languid voices of the four who played bridge. A curious little
company, on the whole. The Princess of Strurm, whose birth was as
sure as her social standing was doubtful, the heroine of countless
scandals, ignored by the great heads of her family, impoverished,
living no one knew how, yet remaining the legal guardian of a
stepdaughter, who was reputed to be one of the greatest heiresses in
Europe. The courts had moved to have her set aside, and failed. A
Cardinal of her late husband's faith, empowered to treat with her on
behalf of his relations, offered a fortune for her cession of
Jeanne, and was laughed at for his pains. Whatever her life had
been, she remained custodian of the child of the great banker whom
she had married late in life. She endured calmly the threats, the
entreaties, the bribes, of Jeanne's own relations. Jeanne, she was
determined, should enter life under her wing, and hers only. In the
end she had her way. Jeanne was entering life now, not through the
respectable but somewhat bourgeois avenue by which her great monied
relatives would have led her, but under the auspices of her
stepmother, whose position as chaperon to a great heiress had
already thrown open a great many doors which would have been
permanently closed to her in any other guise. The Princess herself
was always consistent. She assumed to herself an arrogant right to
do as she pleased and live as she pleased. She was of the House of
Strurm, which had been noble for centuries, and had connections with
royalty. That was enough. A few forgot her past and admitted her
claim. Those who did not she ignored....

Then there was Lord Ronald Engleton, an orphan brought up in Paris,
a would-be decadent, a dabbler in all modern iniquities, redeemed
from folly only by a certain not altogether wholesome cleverness,
yet with a disposition which sometimes gained for him friends in