totally ignorant of any master passion, and conventionally drilled, her
beauty and sweet temper had carried her easily on the frothy crest of
her first season, over the eligible and ineligible alike, leaving her at
Lenox, a rather tired and breathless girl, in love with pleasure and the
world which treated her so well.

The death of her mother abroad had made little impression upon her--her
uncle, Major Belwether, having cared for her since her father's death
when she was ten years old. So, although the scandal of her mother's
self-exile had been in a measure condoned by a tardy marriage to the man
for whom she had left everything, her daughter had grown up ignorant of
any particular feeling for a mother she could scarcely remember.

However, she wore black and went nowhere for the second winter, during
which time she learned a great deal concerning the unconventional
proclivities of the women of her race and family, enough to impress her
so seriously that on an exaggerated impulse she had come to one of her
characteristic decisions.

That decision was to break the unsavoury record at the first justifiable
opportunity. And the opportunity came in the shape of Quarrier. As
though wedlock were actually the sanctuary which an alarmed nation
pretends it to be!

Now, approaching the threshold of a third and last season, and having
put away her almost meaningless mourning, there had stolen into her
sense of security something irksome in the promise she had made to give
Quarrier a definite answer before winter.

Perhaps it had been the lack of interest in the people at Shotover,