mong the woods that overhang the valley
of the Thames. No breezes that blow could waft strength or vitality to
those feeble lungs. At thirty the Duchess of Dovedale had lost all her
babies, save one frail sapling, a girl of two years old, who promised
to have a somewhat better constitution than her perished brothers and
sisters. On this small paragon the Duchess concentrated her cares and
hopes. She gave up hunting--much to the disgust of that Nimrod, her
husband--in order to superintend her nursery. From the most
pleasure-loving of matrons, she became the most domestic. Lady Mabel
Ashbourne was to grow up the perfection of health, wisdom, and beauty,
under the mother's loving care. She would have a great fortune, for
there was a considerable portion of the Duke's property which he was
free to bequeath to his daughter. He had coal-pits in the North, and a
tin-mine in the West. He had a house at Kensington which he had built
for himself, a model Queen Anne mansion, with every article of
furniture made on the strictest aesthetic principles, and not an
anachronism from the garrets to the cellars. You might have expected to
meet Marlborough on the stairs, and to find Addison reading in the
library. The Scottish castle and the Buckinghamshire Paradise would go
with the title; but the Duke, delighted with the easy-going sport of
the New Forest, had bought six hundred acres between Stony Cross and
Romsey--a wide stretch of those low level pastures across which you see
the distant roofs and spires of the good old market town--and had made
for himself an archetypal home-farm, and had built himself a
hunting-box, with stables and kennels of the most perfect kind; and
this estate, with the Queen Anne house, and the pits, and the mine, was
his very own to dispose of as he pleased.

Lady Jane's marriage had proved happy. Her husband, always egged on by
her ambitious promptings, had made himself an important figure in the
senate, and had been on the eve of entering the cabinet as Colonial
Secretary, when death cut short his career. A hard winter and a sharp
attack of bronchitis nipped the aspiring senator in the bud.

Lady Jane was as nearly broken-hearted as so cold a woman could be. She
had loved her husband better than anything in this life, except
herself. He left her with one son and a handsome jointure, with the
full possession of Briarwood until her son's majority. Upon that only
child Lady Jane lavished all her care, but did