the
object of her search. She strayed--I use the word "strayed" designedly,
for she certainly did not do it of set purpose--with one of the nurses
into accident wards, into the men's wards, where her flowers and fruits
and gentle words made her welcome, and where the bearded masculine
faces, worn sometimes by pain and privation of long standing, appealed
to her sensibilities in a new and not altogether unpleasant way.

For Lady Alice was a very feminine creature, and liked, as most women do
like, to be admired and adored. She had confessed as much when she told
the story of her life to her daughter Lesley. And she had something less
than her woman's due in this respect. Caspar Brooke had very honestly
loved and admired her, but in a protective and slightly "superior" way.
The earl, her father, belonged to that conservative portion of the
aristocratic class which treats its womankind with distinguished
civility and profoundest contempt. In her father's home Lady Alice felt
herself of no account. As years increased upon her, the charm of her
graceful manner was marred by advancing self-distrust. In losing (as
she, at least, thought) her physical attractions, she lost all that
entitled her to consideration amongst the men and women with whom she
lived. She had no fixed position, no private fortune, nothing that would
avail her in the least when her father died; and the gentle coldness of
her manner did not encourage women to intimacy, or invite men to pay her
attentions that she would scorn. In any other situation, her natural
gifts and virtues would have fairer play. As a spinster, she would still
have had lovers; as a widow, suitors by the dozen; as a happily married
woman she would have been courted, complimented, flattered, by all the
world. But, as a woman merely separated from a husband with whom she had
in the first instance eloped, living on sufferance, as it were, in her
father's house, "neither maid, wife, nor widow," she was in a situation
which became more irksome and more untenable every year.

To a woman conscious of such a jar in her private life, it was really a
new and delightful experience to find herself in a place where she could
be of some real use, where she was admired and respected and flattered
by that unconscious flattery given us sometimes by the preference of the
sick and miserable. The men in one of the accident wards were greatly
taken with Lady Alice. There was her title, to begin with; ther