some flooding onset of memory. Servants
passed and repassed through the hall; sounds loud and merry came from
the drawing-room. Sir James neither saw nor heard.

CHAPTER III

Alicia Drake--a vision of pale pink--had just appeared in the long
gallery at Tallyn, on her way to dinner. Her dress, her jewels, and all
her minor appointments were of that quality and perfection to which only
much thought and plentiful money can attain. She had not, in fact, been
romancing in that account of her afternoon which has been already
quoted. Dress was her weapon and her stock in trade; it was, she said,
necessary to her "career." And on this plea she steadily exacted in its
support a proportion of the family income which left but small pickings
for the schooling of her younger brothers and the allowances of her two
younger sisters. But so great were the indulgence and the pride of her
parents--small Devonshire land-owners living on an impoverished
estate--that Alicia's demands were conceded without a murmur. They
themselves were insignificant folk, who had, in their own opinion,
failed in life; and most of their children seemed to them to possess the
same ineffective qualities--or the same absence of qualities--as
themselves. But Alicia represented their one chance of something
brilliant and interesting, something to lift them above their neighbors
and break up the monotony of their later lives. Their devotion was a
strange mixture of love and selfishness; at any rate, Alicia could
always feel, and did always feel, that she was playing her family's game
as well as her own.

Her own game, of course, came first. She was not a beauty, in the sense
in which Diana Mallory was a beauty; and of that fact she had been
perfectly aware after her first apparently careless glance at the
new-comer of the afternoon. But she had points that never failed to
attract notice: a free and rather insolent carriage, audaciously
beautiful eyes, a general roundness and softness, and a
grace--unfailing, deliberate, and provocative, even in actions, morally,
the most graceless--that would have alone secured her the "career" on
which she was bent.

Of her mental qualities, one of the most profitable was a very shrewd
power of observation. As she swept slowly along the corridor, which
overlooked the hall at Tallyn, none of the details of the house were
lost upon her. Tallyn was vast, ugly--above all, rich. Henry Marsham,
the deceased husband of Lady