sat to some world-famed artist, who
had entreated to be allowed to put her face into his great picture, and
how the house was literally besieged with her lovers. By all this, and
much more in the same strain, Marion perceived that her young sister,
whom she had last seen in all the raw unformed awkwardness of early
girlhood, had developed somehow into a beautiful woman.

And there came photographs of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the
glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs,
portraying her in strange and different ways. There was Vera looking out
through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera
as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as
a _devote_, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon her bosom.
Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her white
shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head covered with
a fur cap. But always she was beautiful, always a young queen, even in
these poor, fading photographs, that could give but a faint idea of her
loveliness to those who knew her not.

"She must be very handsome," Eustace Daintree would say heartily, as his
wife, with a little natural flush of pride, handed some picture of her
young sister across the breakfast-table to him. "How I wish we could see
her, she must be worth looking at, indeed. Mother, have you seen this
last one of Vera?"

"Beauty is a snare," the old lady would answer viciously, hardly deigning
to glance at the lovely face; "and your sister seems to me, Marion, to be
dressed up like an actress, most unlike my idea of a modest English
girl."

Then Marion would take her treasure away with her up into her own room,
out of the way of her mother-in-law's stern and repelling remarks.

But one day there came sad news to the vicarage at Sutton. Theodora,
Princess Marinari, caught the Roman fever in its worst form, and after
a few agonizing letters and telegrams, that came so rapidly one upon the
other that she had hardly time to realize the dreadful truth, Marion
learnt that her sister was dead.

After that, the elder sister's English home became naturally the right
and fitting place for Vera to come to. So she left her gay life and her
lovers, her bright dresses and all that had hitherto seemed to her worth
living for, and came back to her father's country and took up her abode
in Eustace Daintree's quiet vicarage, where she became