till buried in the article
she had found, and reading on to herself, too much interested to stop a
moment.

"Is anybody amusing dead?" enquired Cecilia, with calm.

"What did you say?" asked the Countess, reaching the end. "This is the
most frightful thing I ever heard of! A million of francs--in small
sums--extracted on all sorts of pretexts--probably as blackmail--it is
perfectly horrible."

"Who has extracted a million of francs from whom?" asked Cecilia, quite
indifferent.

"Guido d'Este, of course! I told you--from the Princess Anatolie----"

"Guido?" Cecilia started from her seat. "It is a lie!" she cried,
leaning over her mother's shoulder and reading quickly. "It is an
infamous lie!"

"My dear?" protested the Countess. "They would not dare to print such a
thing if it were not true! Poor Guido! Of course, I suppose they take an
exaggerated view, but the Princess always gave me to understand that he
had large debts. It was a million, you see, just that million they
wished us to give for your dowry! Yes, that would have set him straight.
But they did not get it! My child, what an escape you have made! Just
fancy if you had been already married!"

"I do not believe a word of it," said Cecilia, indignantly throwing down
the paper she had taken from her mother's hand. "Besides, there is only
an initial. It only speaks of a certain Monsieur d'E."

"Oh, there is no doubt about it, I am afraid. His aunt, 'a certain
Princess,' his father 'one of the great of the earth.' It could not be
any one else."

"I should like to kill the people who write such things!" Cecilia was
righteously angry.

The seed sown by Monsieur Leroy was bearing fruit already, and in a much
more public place than he had expected, or even wished. The young lawyer
cared much less for the money he might make out of the affair than for
the advantage of having his name connected with a famous scandal, and he
had not found it hard to make the story public. The article appeared in
the shape of a letter from an occasional correspondent, and said it was
rumoured that since her nephew was to make a rich marriage the Princess
would bring suit to recover the sums she had been induced to lend him on
divers pretences. Her legal representative in Rome, it was stated, had
been interviewed, but had positively refused to give any information,
and his name was given in full, whereas all the others were indicated by
initials followed by dots. The lawyer flat