Ten years ago she had lost her husband, in the year following most of her capital had gone in a mad-cat speculation, and three years later her gallant brother-in-law died, leaving her a yearly income sufficient for expenses and education if she would undertake to mother his little daughter.  Since then she had led the usual abortive life of the woman who lives on the past glamour of her husband’s success and a limited income, upon which she tries ineffectually to dovetail herself into a society to which she does not rightly belong.  Having noticed an increasing plenitude of silver among the ash-gold of her hair, a deepening of the lines of discord between her brows, and the threads of discontent which were daily being hemstitched into her face by the sharp needles of make-believe, covetousness, and a precarious banking account, she had recently decided to try and annex, or rather try and graft herself on to a certain unsuspecting male being en secondes noces.

And that simply cannot be done if there is the slightest shadow upon one’s appendages.

So she sat down in the chair with as good a grace as she could muster, and arranged her big picture hat so that the spring sun should not draw Sir Jonathan’s attention to the methods she employed to combat the rapidity with which what remained of her prettiness, prematurely faded by the Indian sun, was vanishing.

For a long and trying moment he sat silently staring at her, wondering as he had always wondered what had induced his old friend to place his little girl in such inadequate, feeble hands.

To break the tension Lady Hetth clanked a silver Indian bracelet bought at Liberty’s against an Egyptian chain sold by Swan & Edgar’s, and the man frowned as he drew a series of cats on his blotting-paper.

CHAPTER III

  “Against stupidity the very gods
  Themselves contend in vain!”—­Schiller.

“Let me see,” he said slowly.  “You have been in India I believe.  I wonder if you know anything about it!”

“I lived ten years in the Punjab.”  This information was given with the intense self-satisfaction peculiar to the feminine Anglo-Indian.  “With my husband,” was added after a rather damping silence, “who was knighted for certain—­er—­work he did in the Indian Civil Service.”

“That doesn’t mean that you know anything about the country, Mam.  Leonie has been with you almost seven years, please correct me if I make any mistake.  She is seven this month you say.  She was four months old when she came over from India.  Did her ayah come with her, by the way?  No!  Had she been good to the baby—­yes! yes!  I know, they always are, but these dreams indicate that the child has been badly frightened some time or another!”

“But she couldn’t be frightened at four months,” vacantly interrupted Susan Hetth, who could not see the trend of the conversation, or the need of the detailed interrogation.  “She would be far too young!”