n. "She had had a
miserable life as a girl, and even after she was grown up. When she met
Mr. Varick, and they fell in love at first sight, she'd hardly ever
seen a man to speak to, excepting some of her father's tiresome old
cronies--"

"Was she pretty?" asked Blanche abruptly.

"Oh, no,"--the other shook her head decidedly. "Not at all pretty--in
fact I suppose most people would have called her _very_ plain. Poor
Milly was sallow, and, when I knew her, very thin; but I believe she'd
never been really strong, never really healthy." She hesitated, and then
said in a low voice: "That made Mr. Varick's wonderful devotion to her
all the more touching."

Blanche Farrow hardly knew what to say. "Yes, indeed," she murmured
mechanically.

Lionel devoted to a plain, unhealthy woman? Somehow she found it quite
impossible to believe that he could ever have been that. And yet there
was no doubting the sincerity of the girl's accents.

"Both Dr. Panton and I used to agree," Helen went on, "that he didn't
give himself enough air and exercise. I hired a car for part of the
time, and used to take him out for a good blow, now and again."

"And what did Mrs. Varick really die of?" asked Blanche Farrow.

"Pernicious anaemia," answered Helen promptly. "It's a curious,
little-known disease, from what I can make out. The doctor told me he
thought she had had it for a long time--or, at any rate, that she had
had it for some years before she married Mr. Varick."

There was a pause.

"I wonder why they didn't come and live here?" said Miss Farrow
thoughtfully.

"Oh, but she hated Wyndfell Hall! You see, her father's whole mind had
been set on nothing but this house, and making it as perfect as
possible. It was in a dreadful state when he inherited it from an old
cousin; yet he was offered, even so, an enormous sum for some of the
wonderful oak ceilings. But he refused the offer--indignantly, and he
set himself to make it what it must have been hundreds of years ago."

"He hardly succeeded in doing that," observed Blanche Farrow dryly. "Our
ancestors lived less comfortably than we do now, Miss Brabazon. Instead
of beautiful old Persian carpets, there must have been rushes on all the
floors. And as for the furniture of those days--it was probably all made
of plain, hard, unpolished wood."

"Well, at any rate,"--the girl spoke with a touch of impatience--"Milly
hated this place. She told me once she had never known a day's real
ha