"Beauty is a snare," the old lady would answer viciously, hardly deigning
to glance at the lovely face; "and your sister seems to me, Marion, to be
dressed up like an actress, most unlike my idea of a modest English
girl."

Then Marion would take her treasure away with her up into her own room,
out of the way of her mother-in-law's stern and repelling remarks.

But one day there came sad news to the vicarage at Sutton. Theodora,
Princess Marinari, caught the Roman fever in its worst form, and after
a few agonizing letters and telegrams, that came so rapidly one upon the
other that she had hardly time to realize the dreadful truth, Marion
learnt that her sister was dead.

After that, the elder sister's English home became naturally the right
and fitting place for Vera to come to. So she left her gay life and her
lovers, her bright dresses and all that had hitherto seemed to her worth
living for, and came back to her father's country and took up her abode
in Eustace Daintree's quiet vicarage, where she became shortly her
sister's idol and her sister's mother-in-law's mortal foe.

And then it was that the worthy clergyman came to discover that to put
three grown-up women into the same house, and to expect them to live
together in peace and amity, is about as foolhardy an experiment as to
shut up a bulldog, a parrot, and a tom-cat in a cupboard, and expect
them to behave like so many lambs.

It is now rather more than a year since Vera Nevill came to live in her
brother-in-law's house. Let me waste no further time, but introduce her