l and yet to have your home pleasant and your life
adventurous, certainly someone must suffer. Everything had always fallen
upon Lizzie.

Mrs. Rand's husband had been a colonel and they had lived at Eastbourne;
on his death it was discovered that he had debts and obligations to a
lady in the chorus of a light opera then popular in London. The debts
and the lady Mrs. Rand had covered with romance, because she considered
that they were due to the Colonel's insatiable appetite for
Adventure--but, romance or no, there was now very little to live upon.

They moved to London. Daisy was obviously so pretty that it would be
absurd to expect her to work, and "she would be married in a minute," so
Lizzie had, during the last five years, kept the family. It would be
impossible to give any clear idea of the effect on Mrs. Rand that
Lizzie's connection with the Beaminster family had. Mrs. Rand loved
anything that was great and solemn and ceremonious; she loved Royalties,
bands and soldiers gave her a choke in her throat, the "Society News" in
the _Daily Mail_ was like a fine picture or a splendid play. She was no
snob; it was simply that she saw life as a background to slow stately
figures gorgeously attired.

In all England there was no one like the Duchess of Wrexe; in all
England there was no family like the Beaminster family.

Even Royalty had not quite their glow and glitter; Royalty you might see
any day, driving, bowing, smiling. The Queen had a smile for everyone
and was at home in the merest cottage; but the Duchess, the Duchess--no
one, not even Lizzie, on whose shoulders the whole fortunes of the
Beaministers rested, ever saw.

There was nothing about the Beaminsters that Mrs. Rand did not know, and
so of course she knew all about the unhappy past history of Francis
Breton. That any Beaminster should have behaved rather as her own dead
colonel had once behaved gave one a link at once.

Mrs. Rand's mind was, at the best of times, a confused one, and, in the
dead of night, she could imagine a scene in which the wonderful Duchess
would send for her, give her tea, press her hands and say, "Ah! Dear
Mrs. Rand, our men-folk--your husband and my grandson--what trouble they
give us, but we love them nevertheless."

So romantic was Mrs. Rand's mind that she saw nothing extraordinary in
the coincidence of Mr. Breton's arrival at their very doors. Of course
he would arrive there! Where else could he arrive? And of course he