In order duly to set forth who and what was this young woman, who thus
audaciously set at defiance the powers that were, it will be necessary
that I should take a brief survey of Marion's family history.

Marion, then, be it known, was the eldest of three sisters; so much the
eldest, that when Mr. Daintree had met her and married her in Rome during
one of his brief holidays, the two remaining sisters had been at the time
hardly more than children. Colonel Nevill, their father, had married an
Italian lady, long since dead, and had lived a nomad life ever since he
had become a widower; moving about chiefly between Nice, Rome, and Malta.
Wherever pleasant society was to be found, there would Colonel Nevill and
his daughters instinctively drift, and year after year they became more
and more enamoured of their foreign life, and less and less disposed to
venture back to the chill fogs and cloudy skies of their native land.

Three years after Marion had left them, and gone away with her husband to
his English vicarage; Theodora, the second daughter, had at eighteen
married an Italian prince, whose lineage was ancient, but whose acres
were few; and Colonel Nevill, dying rather suddenly almost immediately
after, Vera, the youngest daughter, as was most natural, instantly found
a home with Princess Marinari.

All this time Marion lived at Sutton-in-the-Wold, and saw none of them.
She wept copiously at the news of her father's death, regretting bitterly
her inability to receive his parting blessing; but, her little Minnie
being born shortly after, her thoughts were fortunately diverted into a
happier channel, and she suffered from her loss less keenly and recovered
from it more quickly than had she had no separate life and no separate
interests of her own to engross her. Still, being essentially
affectionate and faithful, she clung to the memory of the two sisters now