separated so entirely from her. For some years she and Theodora kept up a
brisk correspondence. Marion's letters were full of the sayings and
doings of Tommy and Minnie, and Theodora's were full of nothing but Vera.

What Vera had looked like at her first ball, how Prince this and Marquis
so-and-so had admired her; how she had been smothered with bouquets and
bonbons at Carnival time; how she had sat to some world-famed artist, who
had entreated to be allowed to put her face into his great picture, and
how the house was literally besieged with her lovers. By all this, and
much more in the same strain, Marion perceived that her young sister,
whom she had last seen in all the raw unformed awkwardness of early
girlhood, had developed somehow into a beautiful woman.

And there came photographs of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the
glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs,
portraying her in strange and different ways. There was Vera looking out
through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera
as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as
a _dévote_, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon her bosom.
Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her white
shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head covered with
a fur cap. But always she was beautiful, always a young queen, even in
these poor, fading photographs, that could give but a faint idea of her
loveliness to those who knew her not.

"She must be very handsome," Eustace Daintree would say heartily, as his
wife, with a little natural flush of pride, handed some picture of her
young sister across the breakfast-table to him. "How I wish we could see
her, she must be worth looking at, indeed. Mother, have you seen this
last one of Vera?"