Lady Belgrade, she was launched
into fashionable society. And society received the young expectant of
enormous wealth, as society always does, with excessive adulation.

Salome was admired, followed, flattered, feted, as though she had been
a beauty as well as an heiress. She was petted at home and worshiped
abroad. Her father gave unlimited pocket-money in form of bank-cheques,
to be filled up at her own discretion. For she was his only daughter, and
he wished to get her in love with the world and out of conceit of a
convent. And surely the run of his bank, and of all the fine shops of
London, would do that, he thought, if anything could.

But Salome remained a "sealed book" to the wealthy banker, and a great
trial to the fashionable chaperon who had her in training. Salome
_would not_ grow pretty, in spite of all that could be done for her.
Salome would not make a sensation, for all her father's wealth and her
own expectations. She remained quiet, shy, silent, dreamy, even in the
gayest society, as in the Highland solitudes, with one worship in her
soul--the worship of that self-devoted son--that self-banished prince,
whose "counterfeit presentment" she had seen in the tower at Lone, and
who had become the idol of her religion.

But all this did not hinder the heiress from receiving some very matter
of fact and highly eligible offers of marriage; for though Salome, in the
holiness of her dreams, was almost unapproachable, the banker was not
inaccessible. And it was through her father that Salome, in the course of
the season, had successively the coronet of a widowed earl, the title of
a duke's younger son, and the fortune of a baronet who was just of age,
laid at her feet.

She rejected them all--to her father's great disappointment and
disturbance.

"I fear--I do much fear that her mind still runs on that convent. She
does nothing but dream, dream, dream, and absolutely ignore homage that
would turn another girl's head. I wish she were well married, or--I had
almost said ill married! anything is better than the convent for my only
surviving child! If she will not accept an earl or a baronet, why cannot
her perversity take the form of any other girl's perversity? Why can she
not fall in love with some penniless younger son, or some dissipated
captain in a marching regiment? I am sure even under such circumstances
I should not perform the part of the 'cruel parent' in the comedies! I
should say, 'Bless you my chi