and ribbons that have cost a small fortune--clumsy awkward girls, who
look at _me_ as if I were some new kind of wild animal."

The saloons at Foretdechene were rich in monster sheets of looking-glass;
and in wandering discontentedly about the room Diana Paget saw herself
reflected many times in all her shabbiness. It was only very lately she
had discovered that she had some pretension to good looks; for her
father, who could not or would not educate her decently or clothe her
creditably, took a very high tone of morality in his paternal teaching,
and, in the fear that she might one day grow vain of her beauty, had
taken care to impress upon her at an early age that she was the very
incarnation of all that is lean and sallow and awkward.




CHAPTER II.

THE EASY DESCENT


Amongst the many imprudences of which Horatio Paget--once a cornet in
a crack cavalry regiment, always a captain in his intercourse with the
world--had been guilty during the course of a long career, there was
none for which he so bitterly reproached himself as for a certain
foolish marriage which he had made late in his life. It was when he
had thrown away the last chance that an indulgent destiny had given
him, that the ruined fop of the Regency, the sometime member of the
Beef-steak Club, the man who in his earliest youth had worn a silver
gridiron at his button-hole, and played piquet in the gilded saloons of