her efforts to drown them both. While the affair lasted it was
ideal and beautiful, but unfortunately it lasted only two months.

Then Lord Albany, temporarily in America as honorary attache to
the British embassy, his adoring glances, his accent, and the way
he brushed his hair, proved too much for the susceptible heart of
Aline, and she chucked Herbert and asked herself how a woman of
her age could have seriously considered marrying a youth just out
of Harvard! At that time she was a woman of nineteen; but, as she
had been before the public ever since she was eleven, the women
declared she was not a day under twenty-six; and the men knew she
could not possibly be over sixteen!

Aline's own idea of herself was that without some one in love
with her she could not exist--that, unless she knew some man cared
for her and for her alone, she would wither and die. As a matter
of fact, whether any one loved her or not did not in the least
interest her. There were several dozen men who could testify to
that. They knew! What she really wanted was to be head over ears
in love--to adore some one, to worship him, to imagine herself
starving for him and making sacrifice hits for him; but when the
moment came to make the sacrifice hit and marry the man, she
invariably found that a greater, truer love had arisen--for some
one else.

This greater and truer love always made her behave abominably to
the youth she had just jilted. She wasted no time on post-mortems.
She was so eager to show her absolute loyalty to the new monarch
that she grudged every thought she ever had given the one she had
cast into exile. She resented him bitterly. She could not forgive him