t how to
get you to England?"

"Perhaps I could go as somebody's maid," I reflected aloud.

She looked at me sharply. _"Would_ you do that?"

"It would be better than being an advertisement for Corn Plasters," I
smiled.

"Then," said Lady Kilmarny, "perhaps, after all, I can help you. But
no--I should never dare to suggest it! The thought of a girl like
you--it would be too dreadful."

CHAPTER IV

When my father had been extravagant, he used to say gaily in
self-defence that "one owed something to one's ancestors." Certainly, if
it had not been for several of his ancestors, he would not have owed so
much to his contemporaries. But in spite of their agreeable vices, or
because of them, I was brought up in the cult of ancestor worship, as
religiously as if I had been Chinese.

To be a d'Angely was a privilege, in our eyes, which not only supplied
gilding for the gingerbread, but for the most economical substitutes.

"Ne roi je suis,
Ne prince aussi,
Je suis le Sire d'Angely,"

calmly remarked the gentleman of Louis XI.'s time, who became famous for
hanging as many retainers as he liked, and defending his action by
originating the family motto.

Mother also had ancestors who began to take themselves seriously
somewhere about the time of the _Mayflower_, though for all we know they
may have secured their passage in the steerage.

"A Courtenay can do anything," was their rather ambiguous motto, which
suggested that it might have been started in self-defence, if not as a
boast; and it (the name, not the motto) had been thoughtfully
sandwiched in between my Lys and my d'Angely by my sponsors in baptism,
that if necessary I might ever have an excuse at hand for any dark deed
or infra dig-ness.

I used often to murmur the consoling mottoes to myself when pattering
through muddy streets, too poor to take an omnibus, on the way to
sell--or try to sell--my translations or my _menus_. But now, after all
that's happened, if it is to strike conviction to my soul, I shall be
obliged to yell it at the top of my mental lungs.

(That expression may sound ridiculous, but it isn't. We could not talk
to ourselves as we do, in all kinds of voices, high or low, if we hadn't
mental lungs, or at the least, sub-conscious-self lungs.)

_Je suis_ the daughter of the last Sire d'Angely; and a Courtenay can do
anything; so of course it's all right; and it's no good my ancestors
turning in their graves, for they'