osition--but
only once: there came a flash into rather than out of Sepia's eyes that
made any repetition of the insult impossible and Lady Malice wish that
she had left her a wanderer on the face of Europe.

Sepia was the daughter of a clergyman, an uncle of Lady Malice, whose
sons had all gone to the bad, and whose daughters had all vanished from
society. Shortly before the time at which my narrative begins, one of
the latter, however, namely Sepia, the youngest, had reappeared, a
fragment of the family wreck, floating over the gulf of its
destruction. Nobody knew with any certainty where she had been in the
interim: nobody at Durnmelling knew anything but what she chose to
tell, and that was not much. She said she had been a governess in
Austrian Poland and Russia. Lady Margaret had become reconciled to her
presence, and Hesper attached to her.

Of the men who, as I have said, admired her, some felt a peculiar
enchantment in what they called her ugliness; others declared her
devilish handsome; and some shrank from her as if with an undefined
dread of perilous entanglement, if she should but catch them looking
her in the face. Among some of them she was known as Lucifer, in
antithesis to Hesper: they meant the Lucifer of darkness, not the
light-bringer of the morning.

The ladies, on their part, especially Hesper, were much pleased with
Mary. The simplicity of her address and manner, the pains she took to
find the exact thing she wanted, and the modest decision with which she
answered any reference to her, made Hesper even like her. The most
artificially educated of women is yet human, and capable of even more
than liking a fellow-creature as such. When their purchases were ended,
she took her leave with a kind smile, which went on glowing in Mary's
heart long after she had vanished.

"Home, John," said Lady Margaret, the moment the two ladies were
seated. "I hope you have got _all_ you wanted. We shall be late for
luncheon, I fear. I would not for worlds keep Mr. Redmain waiting.--A
little faster, John, please."

Hesper's face darkened. Sepia eyed her fixedly, from under the mingling
of ascended lashes and descended brows. The coachman pretended to obey,
but the horses knew very well when he did and when he did not mean them
to go, and took not a step to the minute more: John had regard to the
splendid-looking black horse on the near side, which was weak in the
wind, as well as on one fired pastern, and cared li