and
white-browed, was her grand-niece, and Neil's second cousin, and as
heiress to ten thousand a year, she might develop into a desirable
_parti_, notwithstanding her ordinary appearance now. And so, when the
girl became an orphan, Lady Jane offered to take charge of her, and took
her into the family as the daughter of the house, though she never
encouraged Neil to think of her as a sister. She was his cousin Blanche,
and entitled to a great deal of forbearance and respect, because of her
money, and because her mother had been the granddaughter of a duke. Neil
called her cousin Blanche, and quarreled with and teased her, and made
fun of her white eyebrows, and said her feet were too big, and her
ankles too small, and that on standing she always bent her knees to make
herself look short; for she was very tall and angular, and awkward every
way.

"Wait till my cousin Bessie grows up; there's a beauty for you," he had
said to his mother on his return from Stoneleigh, where he had spent a
few days the winter previous, and greatly to the annoyance of his
mother, he talked constantly of the lovely child who had made so strong
an impression upon him.

Lady Jane had heard much of Daisy's exploits, and as the stories
concerning her were greatly exaggerated, she looked upon her, if not
actually an abandoned woman, as one whose good name was hopelessly
tarnished, and she never wished to see either her face or that of her
child. Nor did she dream how near the enemy was to her; only just across
the hall, in the room which she fully believed to be occupied by her
friend, old Lady Oakley, from Grosvenor Square. When her husband and
Neil went out, as they did soon after the latter had expressed himself
with regard to Blanche and been sharply reproved, they left the door
ajar, and she could hear the sound of footsteps in the room opposite,
where Lady Oakley was supposed to be making her toilet, just as Lady
Jane was making hers.

"I believe I will go and see her," she said to herself, when her
dressing was completed and she found she had a good fifteen minutes
before the dinner hour, and stepping across the hall she knocked at
Daisy's door.

Daisy's first impulse was to call out, "_Entrez!_" as she did on the
Continent; her second, to open the door herself, which she did,
disclosing to the view of her astonished visitor, not a fat, red-faced
dowager of seventy, but a wonderful vision of girlish loveliness, clad
in simple muslin,