eaux, and more than one title was laid at her gilded feet, she made
up her mind to read her name in Burke.

She took her parents for a tour round the world with a view to polishing
off their lingering idiosyncrasies, and her chance came in India, where
she buried them both. They succumbed to cholera, and the kindly wife of
the viceroy, to whom she had had the forethought to secure a letter,
sent for her to come to Simla and remain as her guest until she found
courage and a chaperon for the return to England. Here she met Captain,
the Honorable Augustus Kaye, heir to an ancient barony, chivalrous,
impressionable, and hard-up. They were married with the blessings of old
friends and new, and, to do her full justice, she made him a good wife
according to her lights. She was quite insanely in love with him at
first, for he looked like one of Ouida's guardsmen, and his pedigree was
so long, and so varied with romantic historic episode, that she was
fully a week committing it to memory.

When he left the army and they had returned to England--via Paris--she
had the wardrobe and establishment of a princess, the right to dine at
the Queen's table, and not a relative in London. She was immoderately
happy, and during the five years of her wedded life she exhausted the
first strength of her affections, buried her feminine caprice, and
whatever of impulse youth may have clung to as its right. When Gussy
Kaye died, the predominant feeling in her bosom was rage at his
inconsiderateness in leaving the world before his father, and nothing
behind him but a courtesy prefix which she could not even use on her
cards.

She opened her soul to searching, and decided that five years of love
were quite enough for any woman, and that her attentions hereafter
should be directed towards the highest worldly success obtainable with
brains, talents, and wealth. To be merely a rich woman in the right set
did not come within measurable distance of her ambition's apex, and she
determined to gratify her passionate self-love by becoming a
personality.

She had long since simulated the repose of the high-born Englishwoman,
until, like all imitators, she far surpassed her models, and her manners
were marked not so much by the caste of Vere de Vere as by an almost
negative stolidity. This at least provided her with an unruffled front
for trying occasions--others besides the Arcots were insensible of her
offerings--which in the United States of America wou