Within six months of his death she had bought a house in St. James’s Place, and her London career had begun.

* * * * *

“It is here that we come in,” said Lord Grosville, when, with more digressions and more plainness of speech with regard to his quondam sister-in-law than can be here reproduced, he had brought his story to this point.  “Blackwater—­the old ruffian—­when he was dying had a moment of remorse.  He wrote to my wife and asked her to look after his girls, ’For God’s sake, Lina, see if you can help Alice—­Wensleydale’s a perfect brute.’  That was the first light we had on the situation, for Adelina had long before washed her hands of him; and we knew that she hated us.  Well, we tried; of course we tried.  But so long as her husband lived Alice would have nothing to say to any of us.  I suppose she thought that for her boy’s sake she’d better keep a bad business to herself as much as possible—­”

“Wensleydale—­Wensleydale?” said Ashe, who had been smoking hard and silently beside his host.  “You mean the man who distinguished himself in the Crimea?  He died last year—­at Naples, wasn’t it?”

Lord Grosville assented.

It appeared that during the last year of his life Lady Alice had nursed her husband faithfully through disease and poverty; for scarcely a vestige of her fortune remained, and an application for money made by Wensleydale to Madame d’Estrees, unknown to his wife, had been peremptorily refused.  The colonel died, and within three months of his death Lady Alice had also lost her son and only child, of blood-poisoning developed in Naples, whither he had been summoned from school that his father might see him for the last time.

Then, after seventeen years, Lady Alice came back to her kindred, who had last seen her as a young girl—­gentle, undeveloped, easily led, and rather stupid.  She returned a gray-haired woman of thirty-four, who had lost youth, fortune, child, and husband; whose aspect, moreover, suggested losses still deeper and more drear.  At first she wrapped herself in what seemed to some a dull and to others a tragic silence.  But suddenly a flame leaped up in her.  She became aware of the position of Madame d’Estrees in London; and one day, at a private view of the Academy, her former step-mother went up to her smiling, with out-stretched hand.  Lady Alice turned very pale; the hand dropped, and Alice Wensleydale walked rapidly away.  But that night, in the Grosville house, she spoke out.

“She told Lina and myself the whole story.  You’d have thought the woman was possessed.  My wife—­she’s not of the crying sort, nor am I. But she cried, and I believe—­well, I can tell you it was enough to move a stone.  And when she’d done, she just went away, and locked her door, and let no one say a word to her.  She has told one or two other relations and friends, and—­”

“And the relations and friends have told others?”