lled on the railings in the
park, 'a long way above any of those plain-headed ones she tried to palm
off upon us last year: the South American girl with the big eyes and a
complexion like a toad, the Forfarshire girl with freckles and
unsophisticated carrots. "Those lovely Spanish eyes," said Lady K----,
"that Titianesque auburn hair!" But it didn't answer. Both the girls
were plain, and they have gone back to their native obscurity spinsters
still. But this is a real thorough-bred one--blood, form, pace, all
there.'

'Who is she?' drawled his friend.

'Lord Maulevrier's sister, Lady Lesbia Haselden. Has money, too, I
believe; rich grandmother; old lady buried alive in Westmoreland; horrid
old miser.'

'I shouldn't mind marrying a miser's granddaughter,' said the other. 'So
nice to know that some wretched old idiot has scraped and hoarded
through a lifetime of deprivation and self-denial, in order that one may
spend his money when he is under the sod.'

Lady Lesbia was accepted everywhere, or almost everywhere, as the beauty
of the season. There were six or seven other girls who aspired to the
same proud position, who were asserted by their own particular friends
to have won it; just as there are generally four or five horses which
claim to be first favourites; but the betting was all in favour of Lady
Lesbia.

Lady Kirkbank told her that she was turning everyone's head, and Lesbia
was quite willing to believe her. But was Lesbia's own head quite steady
in this whirlpool? That was a question which she did not take the
trouble to ask herself.

Her heart was tranquil enough, cold as marble. No shield and safeguard
so secure against the fire of new love as an old love hardly cold.
Lesbia told herself that her heart was a sepulchre, an urn which held a
handful of ashes, the ashes of her passion for John Hammond. It was a
fire quite burned out, she thought; but that extinguished flame had left
death-like coldness.

This was Lesbia's own diagnosis of her case: but the real truth was that
among the herd of men she had met, almost all of them ready to fall down
and worship her, there was not one who had caught her fancy. Her nature
was shallow enough to be passing fickle; the passion which she had taken
for love was little more than a girl's fancy; but the man who had power
to awaken that fancy as John Hammond had done had not yet appeared in
Lady Kirkbank's circle.

'What a cold-hearted creature you must be,' said G