"Some twenty-five years ago a friendless, penniless Englishwoman died at
one of the cheap boarding-schools in Dieppe, where she had officiated for
some time as English teacher and general drudge. She left behind her a
little girl about five years of age--a pretty, engaging child, whose
beauty and infantile fascinations so won the heart of Madame Tellier, the
proprietress of the establishment, that she decided to take charge of the
little creature and educate her, her project being to fit her for the post
of English teacher in her school. But the pretty child grew up to be a
beautiful but unprincipled girl, with an inborn passion for indolence and
luxury. At the age of seventeen she eloped from the school with a young
Parisian gentleman, who had been spending the summer months at one of the
seaside hotels in Dieppe, and her benefactress saw her and heard of her no
more.

"We will pass over the events of the next few years. It would hardly
interest you to follow, as I did, each step by which the heroine of my
history progressed ever downward on the path of vice. We find her at last
traveling in Italy under the protection of the Count von Erlenstein, an
Austrian noble of great wealth and dissolute character. She has cast aside
the name she once bore, and, anticipating the jewel-borrowed cognomens of
Cora Pearl and La Reine Topaze, she adopts a title from the profusion of
pink coral jewelry which she habitually wears, and Rose Sherbrooke is
known as Rose Coral."

Horace paused. A short, sharp sound broke the momentary silence: it was
caused by the snapping of one of the gilded fan-sticks under the pressure
of the white, rigid fingers that clasped it. But the listener kept her
face hidden, and but for that convulsive motion the speaker might have
fancied that she slept, so silent and motionless did she remain. After a
short pause Horace continued: