had meant and expected to be some one in
particular. In the South African past of which people here knew nothing,
but began to gossip much, it had been her dream to marry a man who could
lead her at once to the drawing-room floor of society, and she saw no
reason in herself why she should not be a shining light there. She knew
that she was handsome, and fascinating to men, and while using her gifts
as best she could, always she had burned with an almost fierce desire
to make more of them, to be a beauty and a social star, like those women
of whom she read in the "society columns" of month-old London papers,
women not half as attractive as she. She had felt in herself the
qualities necessary for success in a different world from any she had
known; and because, during a period when she was a touring actress she
had played the parts of great ladies, she had told herself confidently
that she would know without any other teaching how great ladies should
talk, behave, and dress.

"Who _was_ she?" people asked each other, of course, when she and her
husband appeared at Monte Carlo in the beginning of the season, and Lord
Dauntrey began quietly, unobtrusively, to remind old acquaintances of
his own or of his dead uncle's (the last viscount's) existence. Nobody
could answer that question; but "_What_ was she?" seemed simpler of
solution as a puzzle, at least in a negative way; for certainly she was
not a lady. And one or two Americans who had lived in the South of their
own country insisted that she had a "touch of the tar brush." She
confessed to having passed some years in South Africa, "in the country a
good deal of the time." And something was said by gossips who did not
know much, about a first husband who had been "a doctor in some
God-forsaken hole." Perhaps that was true, people told each other; and
if so, it explained how she and Dauntrey had met; because it was
generally understood that he had been, or tried to be, a doctor in
South Africa. Thus the story went round that he had been her late
husband's assistant, and had married her when she was free.

Even the first ten days in Monte Carlo showed Lady Dauntrey that her
brilliant scheme for the season was doomed to failure: and that heart of
hers, out of which Mrs. Collis said a whole macadamized road might be
made, grew sick with disappointment and anxiety.

She had married Dauntrey--almost forced him to marry her, in fact, by
fanning the dying embers of his chivalr