when she was ten and Dick one-and-twenty, had hardly fluttered the
fraternal relationship. She had left them a merry, kittenish child. She
had returned a woman, slender, full-bosomed, graceful, alluring, with a
maturity of fascination beyond her years. Enemies said she had gipsy
blood in her veins. If so, the infusion must have taken place long, long
ago, for her folks were as proud of their name as the Wares of Ware
House. But, for all that, there was a suggestion of the exotic in the
olive and cream complexion, and the oval face, pointing at the dimpled
chin; something of the woodland in her lithe figure and free gestures;
in her swimming, dark eyes one could imagine something fierce and
untamable lying beneath her laughing idleness. Katherine Holroyd called
her a coquette, Austin whatever the whim of a cultured fancy suggested,
and Lord Banstead a little devil. As for Dick, he called her nothing.
His love was too great; his vocabulary too small.

Lord Banstead was a neighbour who, in the course of three months, had
proposed several times to Viviette.

"I'm not very much to look at," he remarked on the first of these
occasions--he was a weedy, pallid youth of six-and-twenty--"and the
title's not very old, I must admit. Governor only a scientific Johnnie,
Margetson, the celebrated chemist, you know, who discovered some beastly
gas or other and got made a peer--but I can sit with the other old
rotters in the House of Lords, you know, if I want. And I've got enough
to run the show, if you'll keep me from chucking it away as I'm doing.
It'd be a godsend if you'd marry me, I give you my word."

"Before I have anything to do with you," replied Viviette, who had heard
Dick express his opinion of Lord Banstead in forcible terms, "you'll
have to forswear sack, and--and a very big AND--"