Archie wrote at once to his aunt, inclosing a card on which Bessie had printed with infinite pains, “I got the ring; thank you ever so much.”

By some fatality this letter, which was directed to Allington, Mass., U.S.A., went astray, and was never received by Miss McPherson, who half expected it, and who, with the memory of the blue-eyed child upon the sands fresh in her mind, was prepared to answer it.  But no letter came to her, or went to Archie either, and so two people were disappointed, and the chasm widened between them, Archie imputing it to his aunt’s peculiar nature, and she charging it all to that Jezebel, as she stigmatized Daisy, of whom she had heard most exaggerated accounts from her brother’s wife, the Lady Jane.

CHAPTER V.

AT PENRHYN PARK.

When, three years after that summer, Mrs. Captain Smithers, of Penrhyn Park, Middlesex, invited Mr. and Mrs. Archibald McPherson to spend a few weeks at her handsome country house, and meet the Hon. John McPherson and his wife, the lady Jane, she did it in perfect faith and with entire confidence in Daisy as a matron of immaculate principles and spotless reputation.  She had met her the previous winter at a pension in Florence, where Daisy, who was suffering from a severe cold on her lungs, played the role of the interesting invalid, and seldom went out except for a short walk in the warmest part of the day, and only appeared in the parlor in the evening, where she made a lovely picture, seated in a large easy-chair, with her pretty blue wrapper and her shawl of soft white wool wrapped around her.

The guests of the house were mostly Americans, who had never heard of Daisy, and knew nothing of Monte Carlo, or Lord Hardy, and only saw her a devoted wife and mother, and wondered vaguely how she could ever have married that long, lank, lazy Englishman, who had neither life nor spirit in him, and whom they thought a monster, because he never seemed the least concerned when his lovely little wife coughed the hardest, and could scarcely speak aloud.  That was the English of him, they said, and they set upon poor Archie behind his back, and tore his reputation as a husband into shreds, and said be neglected his sick wife shamefully, and in consequence, they were kinder and more attentive to her, and her room was full of flowers, and fruit and bottle of port wine and sherry; and Mrs. Captain Smithers, who fully shared the opinions of her American cousins, took the beautiful invalid to drive with her, and made much of her, and thought her the most charming person she had ever met, and ended, as Daisy meant she should, by inviting her to spend the month of August at Penrhyn Park.

“You will meet some very pleasant people,” she said, “and I shall be glad to introduce you to them.  I shall ask Lady Jane McPherson and her husband.  It is a shame you have never met them.  Lady Jane is rather peculiar, but a very good woman, and you ought to know her.”