should think that I wanted to take advantage of her kindness and sponge
upon her for help; but she was irresistible, as only a true Irishwoman
can be, and the first thing I knew, I had emptied my heart of its
worries.

CHAPTER III

"You will have to go back to the cousins you've been living with in
Paris," pronounced Lady Kilmarny. "You're much too young and pretty to
be _anywhere_ alone."

"I can't go on living with them unless I promise to marry Monsieur
Charretier," I explained. "I'd rather scrub floors than marry Monsieur
Charretier."

"You'd never finish one floor. The second would finish you. I thought
French girls--well, then, _half_ French girls--usually let their people
arrange their marriages."

"Perhaps I'm not usual. I _hope_ Monsieur Charretier isn't."

"Is he such a monster?"

"He is fat, especially in all the places he oughtn't to be fat. And old.
But worse than his _embonpoint_ and his nose, he made his money in--you
could never guess."

"I see by your face, my poor child: it was Liver Pills."

"Something far more dreadful."

"Are there lower depths?"

"There are--Corn Plasters."

"Oh, my dear, you are _quite_ right! You couldn't marry him."

"Thank you so much! Then, I can't go back to my cousins. They--they
take Monsieur Charretier seriously. I think they even take his
plasters--gratuitously."

"Is he so very rich?"

"But disgustingly rich. He has an awful, bulbous new chateau in the
country, with dozens of incredibly high-powered motor-cars; and in the
most expensive part of Paris a huge apartment wriggling from floor to
ceiling with _Nouveau Art_. The girl who marries him will have to be
smeared with diamonds, and know the most appalling people. In fact,
she'll have to be a kind of walking, pictorial advertisement for the
success of Charretier's Corn Plasters."

"He must know some nice people, since he knows relations of yours."

"Thank you for the compliment, which I hope you pay me on circumstantial
evidence. But it's deceiving. My mother, I believe, was the only nice
person in her family. These cousins, husband and wife, brought mamma to
Europe to live with them when she was a young girl, quite rich and an
orphan. They were furious when she fell in love with papa, who was only
a lieutenant with nothing but a very old name, the ruins of a castle
that tourists paid francs to see, and a ramshackle house in Paris almost
too dilapidated to let. It was a mere detail to the