All this time Marion lived at Sutton-in-the-Wold, and saw none of them.  She wept copiously at the news of her father’s death, regretting bitterly her inability to receive his parting blessing; but, her little Minnie being born shortly after, her thoughts were fortunately diverted into a happier channel, and she suffered from her loss less keenly and recovered from it more quickly than had she had no separate life and no separate interests of her own to engross her.  Still, being essentially affectionate and faithful, she clung to the memory of the two sisters now separated so entirely from her.  For some years she and Theodora kept up a brisk correspondence.  Marion’s letters were full of the sayings and doings of Tommy and Minnie, and Theodora’s were full of nothing but Vera.

What Vera had looked like at her first ball, how Prince this and Marquis so-and-so had admired her; how she had been smothered with bouquets and bonbons at Carnival time; how she had sat to some world-famed artist, who had entreated to be allowed to put her face into his great picture, and how the house was literally besieged with her lovers.  By all this, and much more in the same strain, Marion perceived that her young sister, whom she had last seen in all the raw unformed awkwardness of early girlhood, had developed somehow into a beautiful woman.

And there came photographs of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs, portraying her in strange and different ways.  There was Vera looking out through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face; Vera as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera draped as a devote, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon her bosom.  Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her white shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head covered with a fur cap.  But always she was beautiful, always a young queen, even in these poor, fading photographs, that could give but a faint idea of her loveliness to those who knew her not.

“She must be very handsome,” Eustace Daintree would say heartily, as his wife, with a little natural flush of pride, handed some picture of her young sister across the breakfast-table to him.  “How I wish we could see her, she must be worth looking at, indeed.  Mother, have you seen this last one of Vera?”

“Beauty is a snare,” the old lady would answer viciously, hardly deigning to glance at the lovely face; “and your sister seems to me, Marion, to be dressed up like an actress, most unlike my idea of a modest English girl.”

Then Marion would take her treasure away with her up into her own room, out of the way of her mother-in-law’s stern and repelling remarks.

But one day there came sad news to the vicarage at Sutton.  Theodora, Princess Marinari, caught the Roman fever in its worst form, and after a few agonizing letters and telegrams, that came so rapidly one upon the other that she had hardly time to realize the dreadful truth, Marion learnt that her sister was dead.