HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT CHAPTER I - SHEWING HOW WRATH BEGAN When Louis Trevelyan was twenty-four years old, he had all the world
before him where to choose; and, among other things, he chose to go to
the Mandarin Islands, and there fell in love with Emily Rowley, the
daughter of Sir Marmaduke, the governor. Sir Marmaduke Rowley, at this
period of his life, was a respectable middle-aged public servant, in
good repute, who had, however, as yet achieved for himself neither an
exalted position nor a large fortune. He had been governor of many
islands, and had never lacked employment; and now, at the age of fifty,
found himself at the Mandarins, with a salary of 3,000 pounds a year,
living in a temperature at which 80 in the shade is considered to be
cool, with eight daughters, and not a shilling saved. A governor at the
Mandarins who is social by nature and hospitable on principle, cannot
save money in the islands even on 3,000 pounds a year when he has eight
daughters. And at the Mandarins, though hospitality is a duty, the
gentlemen who ate Sir Rowley's dinners were not exactly the men whom he
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