lonely, homesick child of fourteen, tasting her first experience of
boarding-school.

Pauline had had many adorers among the younger girls, and a holiday rarely
passed without her receiving some delightful invitations. It was
spitefully noticed by the senior English governess that she was very
rarely invited twice to the same house; but after Rose came to the school,
it became a matter of course that Pauline should spend her holidays at
Woodcote. She had no home of her own, as she often sadly told the girls.
She very seldom said more than that, but it was understood in the school
that the seal ring she wore at her watch-chain belonged to her father, one
of the Norfolk Smythes; and the beautiful woman with powdered hair, whose
miniature hung in her bedroom, was her great-grandmother, the Marquise de
Villeroy, who perished on the scaffold during the Reign of Terror.

It was considered a high privilege by Pauline's band of worshippers to be
allowed to hold this miniature in their hands; but on Rose a still higher
privilege had been once conferred. She had worn the miniature tied round
her neck by a blue ribbon when she acted a part in the French play Miss
Jephson's pupils produced every Christmas. That was in Rose's last year at
school. She left at the end of the next term, as her aunt was in failing
health and wanted her at home.

Soon Pauline left too, and after a brief experience as a private
governess, commenced to give visiting lessons in London. She lived at
first with a cousin of Miss Jephson's, a clergyman's widow; but the
arrangement did not somehow prove a satisfactory one, and it was a relief
to them both when Clare Desborough, whose old admiration for Pauline had
revived on meeting her in London, had begged her to share the little flat
her mother had consented to rent for her, while the family spent the