fashionable lady of society, whose life was all a deception, and the blunt, outspoken woman, who called a spade a spade, and whose rule of action was, as she expressed it, the naked truth and nothing but the naked truth.  Had she worn false teeth and supposed any one thought them natural, she would at once have taken them out to show that they were not; and as to false hair, and frizzes, and powder, and all the many devices used, as she said, “to build a woman,” she abominated them, and preferred to be just what the Lord had made her, without any attempt to improve upon his work.  Once Lucy Grey had asked her why she did not call herself Elizabeth, or Lizzie, instead of Betsey, which was so old-fashioned, and she had retorted, sharply, that though of all names upon earth she thought Betsey the worst, it was given to her by her sponsors in baptism, and Betsey she would remain to the day of her death.

She was tall and angular, with large features, sharp nose, and little bright, black, bead-like eyes, which seemed to look you through, and read your most secret thoughts.  As her name indicated, she was of Scotch descent; indeed, her grandfather was Scotch by birth, but he had moved into England, where her father and mother, and herself were born, so that she called herself English, though she gloried in her Scotch blood and her Scotch face, which was unmistakable.

After her birth, her father had bought a place in Bangor, Wales, which he called Stoneleigh, and there her two brothers, Hugh and John, were born, and her parents had died.

She had come alone to Allington, when comparatively young, and, settling down quietly, had for a time watched closely the habits of the people around her, and posted herself thoroughly with regard to the workings and institutions of a Republic, and then she adopted them heartily, and became an out-and-out American, and only lamented that she could not vote and take part in the politics of the country.  Of her past life she never spoke, and of her family seldom.  Her father and mother were dead; she had two brothers, both well enough in their way, but wholly unlike each other, she had once told Lucy Grey, whom she had always liked, and with whom she was more intimate than with any one else in Allington, unless it were Hannah Jerrold.  Although very proud of her family name and family blood, she was no boaster, and no one in Allington would ever have known that one of her brothers had been in Parliament, and that his wife was a Lady Jane Trevellian, if chance had not thrown them in the way of Mrs. Geraldine.

Once, and once only, had she returned to her native land, and that two or three years before our story opens.  Then she had been absent three or four months, and when she returned to Allington, she seemed grimmer and sterner than ever, and more intolerant of everything which did not savor of the “naked truth.”  And yet, as Lucy Grey had said of her to her sister, she was true as steel to her friends,