y thousand a year, to be.

Needless to say, Mrs. Carr was thenceforth one of the catches of her
generation; but nobody could catch her, though she alone knew how many
had tried. Once she made a list of all the people who had proposed to
her; it included amongst others a bishop, two peers, three members of
parliament, no less than five army officers, an American, and a
dissenting clergyman.

"It is perfectly marvellous, my dear," she said to her companion,
Agatha Terry, "how fond people are of twenty thousand a year, and yet
they all said that they loved me for myself, that is, all except the
dissenter, who wanted me to help to 'feed his flock,' and I liked him
the best of the lot, because he was the honestest."

Mrs. Carr had a beautiful house in Grosvenor Square, a place in
Leicestershire, where she hunted a little, a place in the Isle of
Wight that she rarely visited, and, lastly, a place at Madeira where
she lived for nearly half the year. There never had been a breath of
scandal against her name, nor had she given cause for any. "As for
loving," she would say, "the only things she loved were beetles and
mummies," for she was a clever naturalist, and a faithful student of
the lore of the ancient Egyptians. The beetles, she would explain, had
been the connecting link between the two sciences, since beetles had
led her to scarabaei, and scarabaei to the human husks with which they
are to be found; but this statement, though amusing, was not strictly
accurate, as she had in reality contracted the taste from her late
husband, who had left her a large collection of Egyptian antiquities.

"I do adore a mummy," she would say, "I am small enough in mind and
body already, but it makes me feel inches smaller, and I like to
measure my own diminutiveness."

She was not much of a reader; life was, she declared, too short to
waste in study; but, when she did take up a book, it was generally of
a nature that most women of her class would have called stiff, and
then she could read it without going to sleep.

In addition to these occupations, Mrs. Carr had had various crazes at
different stages of her widowhood, which had now endured for some five
years. She had travelled, she had "gone-in for art;" once she had
speculated a little, but finding that, for a woman, it was a losing
game, she was too shrewd to continue this last pastime. But she always
came back to her beetles and her mummies.

Still, with all her money, her plac