ne to a higher court,
was, after all, decided in his favour. The other man turned out to be a
fraud, and retired into oblivion with his wills and marriage
certificates. Meanwhile, Ellaline Number One awoke to the fact that her
husband wasn't as rich as he was painted, or as nice as she had fancied.
Some of his people were millionaires, but he had run through a good deal
of his fortune because he was mad about gambling. At first, when the
bride supposed that there was heaps of money, she enjoyed gambling, too,
and they were always at Longchamps, or Chantilly, or the English
race-courses, or at Aix or Monte Carlo. By and by, though, when she
found that they were being ruined, she tried to pull her husband up--but
it was too late; or else he was the sort of person who can't be stopped
when he's begun running down hill.

Probably she regretted her cousin by that time, as he was rich again,
and likely to be richer, as well as very distinguished. And when a few
years later (while our Ellaline was a baby) Frederic Lethbridge forged a
millionaire uncle's name, and had to go to prison, she must have
regretted Sir Lionel still more, for she was a little creature who loved
pleasure, and hardly knew how to bear trouble.

Mrs. Senter said that Mr. Lethbridge had been sure the uncle would
shield him rather than have a scandal in the family, and so it was a
great surprise to him to be treated like an ordinary criminal. When he
was sentenced to several years in prison, after a sensational trial, he
contrived to hang himself, and was found stone-dead in his cell. His
widow had to go and live with some dull, disagreeable relations in the
country, who thought it their duty to take her and the baby for a
consideration, and there she died of disappointment and galloping
consumption, leaving a letter for her jilted cousin Lionel, in Bengal,
which begged him to act as guardian for her child. All the money she had
at her death was a few thousand pounds, of which she had never been able
to touch anything but the income, about two hundred pounds a year; and
that sum, Mrs. Senter gave me to understand, constituted my sole right
to consider myself an heiress.

Despite the shameful way in which she had behaved to him, Sir Lionel
accepted the charge, eventually took his cousin's little girl away from
the disagreeable relatives, and put her at Madame de Maluet's, where
Mother Ellaline was educated and particularly desired her daughter to be
educat