u are very shocking! You must not say such
things to me."

"Mustn't I? How shall you prevent me? I am a relative, you know. You
can't treat me as a stranger."

"You are quite too audacious--" she was beginning, when a slim young
cornet came back from the billiard-room.

"The Colonel wants you, Mrs. Ormonde," he said; "and you too, De Burgh.
We are not enough for pool, and you play a capital game, Mrs. Ormonde."

"What are the stakes?" asked De Burgh, rising readily enough.

"Oh, I can't play well at all," said Mrs. Ormonde, following him with
evident reluctance. "Certainly not when Colonel Ormonde is looking on."

"Oh, never mind him. I'll screen you from his hypercritical eyes,"
returned De Burgh, as he held the door open for her to pass out.

So it was, after a spell of heavenly tranquility, as Katherine and her
mother were on their way to England, intending to make a home in or near
London, Mrs. Liddell had been struck down with fever, and Katherine was
left unspeakably desolate. Then she turned to her old friend Mr. Newton,
and found him of infinite use and comfort.

A short space of numb inaction followed, during which she fully realized
the loneliness of her position, and from which she roused herself to
plan her future.

At the time Mrs. Liddell was first attacked with fever they had just
renewed their acquaintance with a Miss Payne, whom they had met in Rome
and at Berlin. She was not unknown in society, for she came of a good
old county family, and was half-sister of the Bertie whose name has
already appeared in these pages.

Their father, with an old man's pride in a handsome only son, had left
the bulk of his fortune to Bertie, while Hannah, who had ministered to
his comfort and borne his ill-humor, inherited only a paltry couple of
hundred a year, with a fairly well furnished house in Wilton Street,
Hyde Park. Her brother would have willingly added to this pittance, but
she sternly refused to accept what did not of right belong to her.
Bertie went with his regiment to India, whence he returned a wiser, a
poorer, and a physically weaker man.

His sister, whose business instincts were much too strong to permit her
wrapping up such a "talent" as a freehold house in the napkin of
unfruitful occupation, looked round to see how she could best turn it to
account. Accident threw in her way a girl of large fortune with no
relations, whose guardians, thankful to find a respectable home for her,
readily ag