teadfast to his King through
twenty years of misery, akin to squalor, the remembrance of which would
for ever darken the rest of his life, but he had endured all that
without bitterness, scarcely without a murmur. And now that twenty years
of self-abnegation were at last finding their reward, now that the King
had come into his own, and the King's faithful friends were being
compensated in accordance with the length of the King's purse, would it
not be arrant cowardice and disloyalty for her--an only child--to oppose
her father's will in the ordering of her own future, to refuse the rich
marriage which would help to restore dignity and grandeur to the ancient
name and to the old home?

Crystal de Cambray was born in England: she had lived the whole of her
life in a small provincial town in this country. But she had been
brought up by her aunt, the Duchesse douairiere d'Agen, and through that
upbringing she had been made to imbibe from her earliest childhood all
the principles of the old regime. These principles consisted chiefly of
implicit obedience by the children to the parents' decrees anent
marriage, of blind worship of the dignity of station, and of duty to
name and caste, to king and country.

The thought would never have entered Crystal's head that she could have
the right to order her own future, or to demand from life her own
special brand of happiness.

Now her fate had been finally decided on by her father, and she was on
the point of taking--at his wish--the irrevocable step which would bind
her for ever to a man whom she could never love. But she did not think
of rebellion, she had no thought of grumbling at Fate or at her father:
Crystal de Cambray had English blood in her veins, the blood that makes
men and women accept the inevitable with set teeth and a determination
to do the right thing even if it hurts. Crystal, therefore, had no
thought of rebellion; she only felt an infinity of regret for something
sweet and intangible which she had hardly realised, hardly expected,
which had been too elusive to be called hope, too remote to be termed
happiness. She gave herself the luxury of this short outburst of
tears--since nobody was near and nobody could see: there was a fearful
pain in her heart while she rested her head against the cushion of the
stiff high-backed chair and cried till it seemed that she never could
cry again whatever sorrow life might still have in store for her.

But when that outburs