hated us. Well, we tried; of course we tried. But so long as her
husband lived Alice would have nothing to say to any of us. I suppose
she thought that for her boy's sake she'd better keep a bad business to
herself as much as possible--"

"Wensleydale--Wensleydale?" said Ashe, who had been smoking hard and
silently beside his host. "You mean the man who distinguished himself in
the Crimea? He died last year--at Naples, wasn't it?"

Lord Grosville assented.

It appeared that during the last year of his life Lady Alice had nursed
her husband faithfully through disease and poverty; for scarcely a
vestige of her fortune remained, and an application for money made by
Wensleydale to Madame d'Estrées, unknown to his wife, had been
peremptorily refused. The colonel died, and within three months of his
death Lady Alice had also lost her son and only child, of
blood-poisoning developed in Naples, whither he had been summoned from
school that his father might see him for the last time.

Then, after seventeen years, Lady Alice came back to her kindred, who
had last seen her as a young girl--gentle, undeveloped, easily led, and
rather stupid. She returned a gray-haired woman of thirty-four, who had
lost youth, fortune, child, and husband; whose aspect, moreover,
suggested losses still deeper and more drear. At first she wrapped
herself in what seemed to some a dull and to others a tragic silence.
But suddenly a flame leaped up in her. She became aware of the position
of Madame d'Estrées in London; and one day, at a private view of the
Academy, her former step-mother went up to her smiling, with
out-stretched hand. Lady Alice turned very pale; the hand dropped, and