Maloja with their
presence that year. In addition to these physical attractions
she carried with her the rarer and indefinable aura of the born
aristocrat. As it happened, she merited that description both by birth
and breeding; but there is a vast company entitled to consideration
on that score to whom nature has cruelly denied the necessary
hallmarks--otherwise the pages of Burke would surely be embellished
with portraits.

Indeed, so far as appearance went, it was rather ludicrous to regard
Helen as the social inferior of any person then resident in the
Kursaal, and it is probable that a glimmering knowledge of this fact
inflamed Mrs. de Courcy Vavasour's wrath to boiling point, when a few
minutes later, she saw her son coolly walk up to the "undesirable"
and enter into conversation with her.

Helen was seated in a shady corner. A flood of sunlight filled the
glass covered veranda with a grateful warmth. She had picked up an
astonishingly well written and scholarly guide book issued by the
proprietors of the hotel, and was deep in its opening treatise on the
history and racial characteristics of the Engadiners, when she was
surprised at hearing herself addressed by name.

"Er--Miss--er--Wynton, I believe?" said a drawling voice.

Looking up, she found George de Courcy Vavasour bending over her in an
attitude that betokened the utmost admiration for both parties to the
tete-a-tete. Under ordinary conditions,--that is to say, if Vavasour's
existence depended on his own exertions,--Helen's eyes would have
dwelt on a gawky youth endowed with a certain pertness that might in
time have brought him from behind the counter of a drapery store to
the wider arena of the floor. As it was, a reasonably large income
gave him unbounded assurance, and his credit with a good tailor was
unquestionable. He represented a British product that flourishes best
in alien soil. There exists a foreign legion of George de Courcy
Vavasours, flaccid heroes of fashion plates, whose parade grounds
change with the seasons from Paris to the Riviera, and from the
Riviera to some nook in the Alps. Providence and a grandfather have
conspired in their behalf to make work unnecessary; but Providence,
more far-seeing than grandfathers, has decreed that they shall be
effete and light brained, so the type does not endure.

Helen, out of the corner of her eye, became aware that Mrs. de Courcy
Vavasour was advancing with all the plumes of the British mat