sed the Leonetta who had left her Kensington home a year
previously.

Nothing had happened to Cleopatra in the meantime, and the elder girl,
after having rapidly adopted subtly modified imitations of her sister's
style of coiffure, was once again thrust hopelessly into the very
position against which her nobler instincts most heartily rebelled. She
refused to remain in a relation of tacit, covert, and ill-concealed
rivalry to one whom the whole world, including her mother, expected her
to love. It was ignominious; it was intolerable. It poisoned her to the
very marrow. It made her ache at night when she ought to have been
sleeping. Had she been less like Leonetta than she was, had she
possessed less passion, less beauty, and less desire than her sister,
she could have endured it. As it was the position entailed a perpetual
upheaval of her peace of mind.

She was at her wits' end. To face her mother with another scheme for
Leonetta's welfare was out of the question. What could she do?

Fortunately for Cleopatra, Leonetta herself brought about the
unravelment in a manner sufficiently satisfactory to her sister.

Charming and, in many ways, irresistible as she was, Leonetta had
brought back a will of her own from Versailles, and a tongue, too, by
means of which she secured that will's highest purposes. During her
absence from London, however, her mother had acquired certain habits and
tastes, the pursuit of which now frequently clashed with her own plans
and ran distinctly counter to her notion of what a mother should be and
should do. For Cleopatra had made singularly few claims upon her
mother's time all this while, and had never questioned her absolute
right to seek her enjoyment when and where she chose.

After a year of this novel experience, during which Mrs. Delarayne had
discovered new haunts and new households in which she could behave, even
if she were not accepted, as a person who was not of "mediaeval
antiquity," her taste for this kind of life had developed. Enamoured as
this sprightly quinquagenarian had always been of the other sex, and
resolute as she was to show that an old war-horse could prance as
bravely as a colt to the stirring trumpet call of youth, she had entered
heart and soul into an existence which her late husband would have
deprecated as strongly as he had once admired the spirit which led her
to do it.

Now the sudden intrusion of a full-grown, wilful and extraordinarily
vigorous girl