your class, and in good season some youth of the same social stratum as
yourself will marry you, and, lo! in place of being a daughter in a
landed gentleman's house, you will be a wife.

Into this little world of a kind-hearted, chivalrous aristocracy (whose
greatest fault was their ignorance of the fact that the smallest
upheaval in humanitarianism, no matter what distance away, registers on
the seismograph of human destiny the world over) Elise Durwent found
her path laid. Increasingly resentful, she trod it until she was
fourteen years of age, when her mother, who had long been bored with
country life, made an important decision--and purchased a town house.

Having done this, Lady Durwent sent her daughter to a convent, a move
which enabled her to get rid of the governess discreetly, and left her
without family cares at all, as both boys were now at school.
Unencumbered, therefore, she said _au revoir_ to Roselawn, and set her
compass for No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens, London.


II.

Chelmsford Gardens is a row of dignified houses on Oxford Street--yet
not on Oxford Street. A miniature park, some forty feet in depth, acts
as a buffer-state between the street itself and the little group of
town houses. It is an oasis in the great plains of London's dingy
dwelling-places, a spot where the owners are rarely seen unless the
season is at its height, when gaily cloaked women and stiff-bosomed men
emerge at theatre-hour and are driven to the opera. Throughout the day
the Gardens (probably so styled on account of the complete absence of
horticultural embellishments) are as silent as the tomb; there is no