land. She was in a fine old house, stripped of most of its saleable
belongings, uncared for, deteriorating year by year, gradually going to
ruin. One need not possess particular keenness of sight to observe
this, and she had chanced to see old houses in like condition in other
countries than England. A man-servant, in a shabby livery, opened the
drawing-room door for her. He was not a picturesque servitor of fallen
fortunes, but an awkward person who was not accustomed to his duties.
Betty wondered if he had been called in from the gardens to meet the
necessities of the moment. His furtive glance at the tall young woman
who passed him, took in with sudden embarrassment the fact that she
plainly did not belong to the dispirited world bounded by Stornham
Court. Without sparkling gems or trailing richness in her wake, she was
suggestively splendid. He did not know whether it was her hair or the
build of her neck and shoulders that did it, but it was revealed to him
that tiaras and collars of stones which blazed belonged without doubt
to her equipment. He recalled that there was a legend to the effect that
the present Lady Anstruthers, who looked like a rag doll, had been the
daughter of a rich American, and that better things might have been
expected of her if she had not been such a poor-spirited creature. If
this was her sister, she perhaps was a young woman of fortune, and that
she was not of poor spirit was plain.

The large drawing-room presented but another aspect of the bareness
of the rest of the house. In times probably long past, possibly in the
Dowager Lady Anstruthers' early years of marriage, the walls had been
hung with white and gold paper of a pattern which dominated the scene,
and had been furnished with gilded chairs, tables, and ottomans. Some
of these last had evidently been removed as they became too much out of
repair for use or ornament. Such as remained, tarnished as to gilding
and worn in the matter of upholstery, stood sparsely scattered on a
desert of carpet, whose huge, flowered medallions had faded almost from
view.

Lady Anstruthers, looking shy and awkward as she fingered an ornament on
a small table, seemed singularly a part of her background. Her evening
dress, slipping off her thin shoulders, was as faded and out of date
as her carpet. It had once been delicately blue and gauzy, but its
gauziness hung in crushed folds and its blue was almost grey. It was
also the dress of a girl, not that