Yet she did not want a divorce, because, despite her husband’s cruelty and the strangeness of his nature, and the unhappiness of their life together, she loved him still, and he loved her.

She was the symbol of his lost youth which had been so full of superb promise, and together they had brought three children into the world. Of course they still loved one another, though they could never have been happy together. Fairy and ogre, they were chained together in their terrible bondage. They could not escape, and would not have done so even if they could, for they were bound by love.

But Sophia, the merciless judge, did not realize this until both had been dead for many years.

Her father had his full share of the Garden conflicting strains, Acton’s fierce passion and Mary’s timidity.

He was a most unhappy man, whose very great energies needed more outlet than his work as a doctor in a slum could give them; yet the timorousness and lack of self-confidence which he had inherited from his mother prevented him from turning his powers into satisfying channels.

He was ambitious, but his ambition sprang from vanity, and when it was not fed by achievement, it turned sour and increased his misery. He did not possess the concentration and aptitude for hard, persistent study which would have burnished his gifts, and brought him social and professional success. On every side he was thwarted, and he threshed insanely against the nets woven by his own most unfortunate character.

Yet his gifts were great. In the practical execution of his work he excelled. He worked like a demon, building a large practice of patients who loved him as much as they feared him, in the heart of a miserably poor and crowded district; and during the twenty years of his work there he saved many hundreds of lives by the exercise of his brilliant gifts of diagnosis and surgery. He let in light, sunshine and a fierce humour into the wretched rooms where his patients lived.

They called him the Fresh Air Doctor, because fresh air was what he most often prescribed. He realized the curative powers of light and sun some time before they became part of the stock-in-trade of clinics and general practitioners in very poor districts and he insisted, with oaths, on his patients sleeping with their windows open.

Sophia used sometimes to ride on his rounds with him when she was a child, and she could remember in later years how, when his small cheap car appeared at the top of the street, windows would fly up all along its squalid length. ‘Open the winder, quick! ’Ere comes Dr Garden!’

The demands made on his vitality by hard physical work were great, but still it ravened for more power, beauty, life – he did not know what would satisfy it, and still the feminine streak of weakness kept him chained in the slum, a lion in a tiny den. He turned to intrigues with coarse or sentimental women to find release; and as he grew older and dimly realized that he would never escape from his own nature and the life to which it bound him, he turned to whisky and drugs.