“What beautiful eyes you have, my dear!” she said with effusion, as she kissed Salome on both cheeks.

The girl smiled and blushed with pleasure, for this was the first time in all her life that she had been credited with any beauty at all.

Lady Belgrade was partly right and partly wrong.

A girl with such a physique as Salome could never be pretty, never be handsome, but, with such a soul as hers, might grow beautiful.

At her Majesty’s first drawing-room, Salome Levison was presented at court, where she attracted the attention, only as the daughter of Sir Lemuel Levison, the new Radical member for Lone, and as the sole heiress of the great banker’s almost fabulous wealth.

Then under the experienced guidance of Lady Belgrade, she was launched into fashionable society.  And society received the young expectant of enormous wealth, as society always does, with excessive adulation.

Salome was admired, followed, flattered, feted, as though she had been a beauty as well as an heiress.  She was petted at home and worshiped abroad.  Her father gave unlimited pocket-money in form of bank-cheques, to be filled up at her own discretion.  For she was his only daughter, and he wished to get her in love with the world and out of conceit of a convent.  And surely the run of his bank, and of all the fine shops of London, would do that, he thought, if anything could.

But Salome remained a “sealed book” to the wealthy banker, and a great trial to the fashionable chaperon who had her in training.  Salome would not grow pretty, in spite of all that could be done for her.  Salome would not make a sensation, for all her father’s wealth and her own expectations.  She remained quiet, shy, silent, dreamy, even in the gayest society, as in the Highland solitudes, with one worship in her soul—­the worship of that self-devoted son—­that self-banished prince, whose “counterfeit presentment” she had seen in the tower at Lone, and who had become the idol of her religion.

But all this did not hinder the heiress from receiving some very matter of fact and highly eligible offers of marriage; for though Salome, in the holiness of her dreams, was almost unapproachable, the banker was not inaccessible.  And it was through her father that Salome, in the course of the season, had successively the coronet of a widowed earl, the title of a duke’s younger son, and the fortune of a baronet who was just of age, laid at her feet.

She rejected them all—­to her father’s great disappointment and disturbance.

“I fear—­I do much fear that her mind still runs on that convent.  She does nothing but dream, dream, dream, and absolutely ignore homage that would turn another girl’s head.  I wish she were well married, or—­I had almost said ill married! anything is better than the convent for my only surviving child!  If she will not accept an earl or a baronet, why cannot her perversity