than his own.  She found herself the object of much flattering attention on the part of persons anxious to stand well with Horace Jewdwine.  With a dignity positively marvellous in so small a woman, her head held high and made higher still by the raised roll of her black hair, Edith reigned for three years in that long drawing-room.  She laid down the law grandiloquently to the young aspirants who thronged her court; she rewarded with superb compliments those who had achieved.  Happily for Edith those gentlemen were masters of social legerdemain; and they conveyed their smiles up the sleeves of their dress-coats adroitly unperceived.

And then, in the very flower of her small dynasty, Lucia came.  Lucia, with her music and her youth and her indestructible charm.  And the little court, fickle by its very nature, went over bodily to Lucia!  To Lucia who did not want it, who would much rather have been without it, but must needs encourage it, play to it, sympathize with it, just to satisfy that instinct of hers which was so fatal and so blind.  And Horace, who to Edith’s great relief had freed himself from this most undesirable attachment, who for three years had presented every appearance of judicious apathy, Horace, perceiving that men’s eyes (and women’s too) loved to follow and to rest upon his cousin, discovering all over again on his own account the mysterious genius of her fascination, had ended by bowing down and worshipping too.  His adoration was the more profound (and in Edith’s shrewd opinion more dangerous), because he kept it to himself; because it pledged him to nothing in the eyes of Lucia and the world.

But the eyes of the world, especially of the journalistic world, are exceedingly sharp; and if Lucia had not been charming in herself those literary ladies and gentlemen would have found her so, as the lady whom Horace Jewdwine was presumably about to marry.  It was Hanson, Hanson of the Courier, who sent the rumour round, “La reine est morte, vive la reine.”  The superb despotic Edith saw herself not only deserted, but deposed; left with neither court nor kingdom; declining from the palace of royalty to the cottage of the private gentlewoman, and maintaining her imperious refinement on a revenue absurdly disproportioned to that end.  Not that as yet there had been any suggestion of Edith’s abdication.  As yet Lucia had only spent her winter holidays at Hampstead.  But when, at the end of the present summer, Lucia suddenly and unexpectedly broke down and her salary ceased with her strength, it became a question of providing her with a home for three months at the very least.  Even then, the revolution was delayed; for Horace had gone abroad in the autumn.  But with every month that Edith remained in power she loved power more; and in her heart she had been considering how, without scandal to the world, or annoyance to Horace, or offence to Lucia, she could put her rival delicately aside.  She had long been on the look-out for easy posts for Lucia, for posts in rich and aristocratic families in the provinces, or better still for ladies in want of charming travelling companions.