long ago. She was only nineteen, but she looked at men and women
with those discerning grey eyes, in which there seemed to lurk a
quiet light like the light of stars, and saw right through them.
She was woman enough--despite the apparent inconsequence of the
schoolroom, which still lent a vagueness to her thoughts and
movements--to fall an easy victim to the appeal of helplessness.
Years, it would appear, are of no account in certain feminine
instincts. Miriam had probably been woman enough at ten years of
age to fly to the rescue of the helpless.

She did not live permanently at the rectory, but visited her mother
from time to time, either in England, or at one of the foreign
resorts of idle people. But the visits, as years went by, became
shorter and rarer. At twenty-one Miriam came into a small fortune
of her own, left by her father in the hands of executors, one of
whom was that John Turner, the Paris banker, who had given Dormer
Colville a letter of introduction to Septimus Marvin. The money was
sorely needed at the rectory, and Miriam drew freely enough on John
Turner.

"You are an extravagant girl," said that astute financier to her,
when they met at the house of Mrs. St. Pierre Lawrence, at Royan, in
France. "I wonder what you spend it on! But I don't trouble my
head about it. You need not explain, you understand. But you can
come to me when you want advice or help. You will find me--in the
background. I am a fat old man, in the background. Useful enough
in my way, perhaps, even to a pretty girl with a sound judgment."

There were many, who, like Loo Barebone, reflected that there were
other worlds open to Miriam Liston. At first she went into those