herself and her pupils for a quarter of a century.  To this lady the Countess entrusted the education of her granddaughters’ minds, while for their physical training she provided another teacher in the person of a clever little Parisian dancing mistress, who had set up at the West-End of London as a teacher of dancing and calisthenics, and had utterly failed to find pupils enough to pay her rent and keep her modest pot-au-feu going.  Mademoiselle Thiebart was very glad to exchange the uncertainties of a first floor in North Audley Street for the comfort and security of Fellside Manor, with a salary of one hundred and fifty pounds a year.

Both Fraeulein and Mademoiselle had been quick to discover that Lady Lesbia was the apple of her grandmother’s eye, while Lady Mary was comparatively an outsider.

So it came about that Mary’s education was in somewise a mere picking-up of the crumbs which fell from Lesbia’s table, and that she was allowed in a general way to run wild.  She was much quicker at any intellectual exercise than Lesbia.  She learned the lessons that were given her at railroad speed, and rattled off her exercises with a slap-dash penmanship which horrified the neat and niggling Fraeulein, and then rushed off to the lake or mountain, and by this means grew browner and browner, and more indelibly freckled day by day, thus widening the gulf between herself and her beauty sister.

But it is not to be supposed that because Lesbia was beautiful, Mary was plain.  This is very far from the truth.  Mary had splendid hazel eyes, with a dancing light in them when she smiled, ruddy auburn hair, white teeth, a deeply-dimpled chin, and a vivacity and archness of expression, which served only in her present state of tutelage for the subjugation of old women and shepherd boys.  Mary had been taught to believe that her chances of future promotion were of the smallest; that nobody would ever talk of her, or think of her by-and-by when she in her turn would make her appearance in London society, and that it would be a very happy thing for her if she were so fortunate as to attract the attention of a fashionable physician, a Canon of Westminster or St. Paul’s, or a barrister in good practice.

Mary turned up her pert little nose at this humdrum lot.

’I would much rather spend all my life among these dear hills than marry a nobody in London,’ she said, fearless of that grand old lady at whose frown so many people shivered.  ’If you don’t think people will like me and admire me—­a little—­you had better save yourself the trouble of taking me to London.  I don’t want to play second fiddle to my sister.’

’You are a very impertinent person, and deserve to be taken at your word,’ replied my lady, scowling at her; ’but I have no doubt before you are twenty you will tell another story.’

‘Oh!’ said Mary, now just turned seventeen, ’then I am not to come out till I am twenty.’