“Wait till my cousin Bessie grows up; there’s a beauty for you,” he had said to his mother on his return from Stoneleigh, where he had spent a few days the winter previous, and greatly to the annoyance of his mother, he talked constantly of the lovely child who had made so strong an impression upon him.

Lady Jane had heard much of Daisy’s exploits, and as the stories concerning her were greatly exaggerated, she looked upon her, if not actually an abandoned woman, as one whose good name was hopelessly tarnished, and she never wished to see either her face or that of her child.  Nor did she dream how near the enemy was to her; only just across the hall, in the room which she fully believed to be occupied by her friend, old Lady Oakley, from Grosvenor Square.  When her husband and Neil went out, as they did soon after the latter had expressed himself with regard to Blanche and been sharply reproved, they left the door ajar, and she could hear the sound of footsteps in the room opposite, where Lady Oakley was supposed to be making her toilet, just as Lady Jane was making hers.

“I believe I will go and see her,” she said to herself, when her dressing was completed and she found she had a good fifteen minutes before the dinner hour, and stepping across the hall she knocked at Daisy’s door.

Daisy’s first impulse was to call out, “Entrez!” as she did on the Continent; her second, to open the door herself, which she did, disclosing to the view of her astonished visitor, not a fat, red-faced dowager of seventy, but a wonderful vision of girlish loveliness, clad in simple muslin, with a mischievous twinkle in the blue eyes which met hers so fearlessly.

“I beg your pardon, miss,” Lady Jane began, stammeringly:  “I thought this was Lady Oakley’s room.  She is my friend.  I hope you will excuse me,” she continued, as she detected the smothered mirth in Daisy’s eyes.

“There is nothing to excuse,” Daisy began, in perfectly well-bred tones, “the mistake was natural.  Lady Oakley did occupy this room, I believe, but she is now in the north wing, as Mrs. Smithers kindly gave this room to me so that I might be near you; that is, if, as I suppose, you are Lady Jane McPherson?” and she looked steadily at her visitor, who with a slight bridling of her long neck, bowed in the affirmative, never doubting that the young person before her was fully her equal, notwithstanding the plainness of her dress, every detail of which she took in at a glance and mentally pronounced perfect.

“Some poor earl’s daughter whom Mrs. Smithers has found.  She has a peculiar talent for making good acquaintances,” she thought, just as Daisy offered her hand, which she involuntarily took, but dropped as if it had been a viper when the latter said: 

“Then you are my aunt, or rather my husband’s aunt, for I am Mrs. Archibald McPherson, and I am so glad to meet you.”

Had a bomb-shell exploded at Lady Jane’s feet and struck her in the face she could not have been more astonished.  Stepping quickly back from this claimant to her notice, her face grew pale for an instant, and then flushed with anger, as she gasped: