on, who foolishly
cancelled a couple of Olive's engagements, and sent her off to dance
with him, whereas wise Violet sat by her mother, refusing all her
partners; but, when _God Save the Queen_ was played, she accepted Lord
Kilcarney's arm, and they pressed forward to see the Lord-Lieutenant and
Her Excellency pass down the room.

Violet's eyes feasted on the bowing black coats and light toilettes,
and, leaning on her escutcheon, she dreamed vividly of the following
year when she would take her place amid all these noble people, and, as
high as they, stand a peeress on the dais.

XX

'So you couldn't manage to keep him after all, my lady? When did he
leave the hotel?'

'Mr. Harding left Dublin last Monday week.'

Alice wondered if her mother hated her; if she didn't, it was difficult
to account for her cruel words. And this was the girl's grief, and she
feared that hatred would beget hatred, and that she would learn to hate
her mother. But Mrs. Barton was a loving and affectionate mother, who
would sacrifice herself for one child almost as readily for the other.
In each of us there are traits that the chances of life have never
revealed; and though she would have sat by the bedside, even if Alice
were stricken with typhoid fever, Mrs. Barton recoiled spitefully like a
cat before the stern rectitudes of a nature so dissimilar from her own.
She had fashioned Olive, who was now but a pale copy of her mother
according to her guise: all the affectations had been faithfully
reproduced, but the charm of the original had evaporated like a perfume.
It would be rash to say that Mrs. Barton did not see that the weapons
which had proved so deadly in her hands were ineffectual in her
daughter's; but twenty years of elegant harlotry had blunted her finer
perceptions, and now the grossest means of pushing Olive and the Marquis
morally and physically into each other's arms seemed to her the best.
Alice was to her but a plain girl, whose misfortune was that she had
ever been born. This idea had grown up with Mrs. Barton, and fifteen
years ago she had seen in the child's face the spinster of fifty. But
since the appearance of Harding, and the manifest interest he had shown
in her daughter, Mrs. Barton's convictions that Alice would never be
able to find a husband had been somewhat shaken, and she had almost
concluded that it would be as well--for there was no knowing what men's
tastes were--to give her a chance. Nor was the