any rate, were poor things nowadays, compared with what they
had been.

But Aileen was more than satisfied with them. How busy he must be, and
with such important business! Poor, harassed darling, how good of him to
write her a word--to give her a thought!

* * * * *

And now Lady Blanche beheld her child crushed and broken, a nervous
wreck, before her life had truly begun. The agonies which the mother
endured were very real, and should have been touching. But she was not a
touching person. All her personal traits--her red-rimmed eyes, her
straggling hair, the slight, disagreeable twist in her nose and
mouth--combined, with her signal lack of dignity and reticence, to stir
the impatience rather than the sympathy of the by-stander.

"And mamma was so fond of her," Julie would say to herself sometimes, in
wonder, proudly contrasting the wild grace and originality of her
disgraced mother with the awkward, slipshod ways of the sister who had
remained a great lady.

Meanwhile, Lady Blanche was, indeed, perpetually conscious of her
strange niece, perpetually thinking of the story her brothers had told
her, perpetually trying to recall the sister she had lost so young, and
then turning from all such things to brood angrily over the Lawrence
letter, and the various other rumors which had reached her of
Warkworth's relations to Miss Le Breton.

What was in the woman's mind now? She looked pale and tragic enough. But
what right had she to grieve--or, if she did grieve, to be pitied?

Jacob Delafield had been fool enough to marry her, and fate would make
her a duchess. So true it is that they who have no business to flourish
do flourish, like green bay-trees.

As to poor Rose--sometimes there would rise on Lady Blanche's mind the
sudden picture of herself and the lost, dark-eyed sister, scampering on
their ponies through the country lanes of their childhood; of her
lessons with Rose, her worship of Rose; and then of that black curtain
of mystery and reprobation which for the younger child of sixteen had
suddenly descended upon Rose and all that concerned her.

But Rose's daughter! All one could say was that she had turned out as
the child of such proceedings might be expected to turn out--a minx. The
aunt's conviction as to that stood firm. And while Rose's face and fate
had sunk into the shadows of the past, even for her sister, Aileen was
_here_, struggling for her delicate, threatened li