Europe," as her friends unanimously called her, no one ventured
to guess--golden key is said to open every door, asserted the more
malignantly inclined.

Enough, she married him, and "the cleverest woman in Europe" had linked
her fate to that "demmed idiot" Blakeney, and not even her most intimate
friends could assign to this strange step any other motive than that of
supreme eccentricity. Those friends who knew, laughed to scorn the idea
that Marguerite St. Just had married a fool for the sake of the worldly
advantages with which he might endow her. They knew, as a matter of
fact, that Marguerite St. Just cared nothing about money, and still less
about a title; moreover, there were at least half a dozen other men in
the cosmopolitan world equally well-born, if not so wealthy as Blakeney,
who would have been only too happy to give Marguerite St. Just any
position she might choose to covet.

As for Sir Percy himself, he was universally voted to be totally
unqualified for the onerous post he had taken upon himself. His chief
qualifications for it seemed to consist in his blind adoration for her,
his great wealth and the high favour in which he stood at the English
court; but London society thought that, taking into consideration his
own intellectual limitations, it would have been wiser on his part had
he bestowed those worldly advantages upon a less brilliant and witty
wife.

Although lately he had been so prominent a figure in fashionable English
society, he had spent most of his early life abroad. His father, the
late Sir Algernon Blakeney, had had the terrible misfortune of seeing
an idolized young wife become hopelessly insane after two years of happy
married life. Percy had just been born when the late Lady Blakeney
fell prey to the terrible malady which in those days was looked upon as
hopelessly incurable and nothing short of a curse of God upon the entire
family. Sir Algernon took his afflicted young wife abroad, and there
presumably Percy was educated, and grew up between an imbecile mother
and a distracted father, until he attained his majority. The death of
his parents following close upon one another left him a free man, and
as Sir Algernon had led a forcibly simple and retired life, the large
Blakeney fortune had increased tenfold.

Sir Percy Blakeney had travelled a great deal abroad, before he brought
home his beautiful, young, French wife. The fashionable circles of the
time were ready to receive the