death.  For reasons of her own, which she considered sufficiently cogent, she had also resigned all expectations of being her aunt’s heiress.  She had taken her liberty, and was prepared to enjoy it.  She had professed herself perfectly contented to live on the comparatively small patrimony secured to her by her father’s will.  It was quite enough, she said, for a single woman,—­at any rate, she would make it enough.

And here she was, in her own old home,—­the home of her childhood, which she was ashamed to think she had well-nigh forgotten.  Since her fifteenth year she had travelled nearly all over the world; London, Paris, Vienna, New York, had each in turn been her ‘home’ under the guidance of her wealthy perambulating American relative; and in the brilliant vortex of an over-moneyed society, she had been caught and whirled like a helpless floating straw.  Mrs.  ‘Fred’ Vancourt, as her aunt was familiarly known to the press paragraphist, had spared no pains to secure for her a grand marriage,—­and every possible advantage that could lead to that one culminating point, had been offered to her.  She had been taught everything; that could possibly add to her natural gifts of intelligence; she had been dressed exquisitely, taken about everywhere, and ‘shown off’ to all the impecunious noblemen of Europe;—­she had been flattered, praised, admired, petted and generally spoilt, and had been proposed to by ‘eligible’ gentlemen with every recurring season,—­but all in vain.  She had taken a singular notion into her head—­an idea which her matter-of-fact aunt told her was supremely ridiculous.  She wanted to be loved.

“Any man can ask a girl to marry him, if he has pluck and impudence!” she said; “Especially if the girl has money, or expectations of money, and is not downright deformed, repulsive and ill-bred.  But proposals of marriage don’t always mean love.  I don’t care a bit about being married,—­but I do want to be loved—­really loved!—­I want to be ‘dear to someone else’ as Tennyson sings it,—­ not for what I have, but for what I am.”

It was this curious, old-fashioned notion of wanting to be loved, that had estranged Maryllia from her wealthy American protectress.  It had developed from mere fireside argument and occasional dissension, into downright feud, and its present result was self-evident.  Maryllia had broken her social fetters, and had returned to her own rightful home in a state which, for her, considered by her past experience, was one of genteel poverty, but which was also one of glorious independence.  And as she restfully reclined under the old rose silk hangings which were to have encanopied that perished beauty from which she derived her own fairness, she was conscious of a novel and soothing sense of calm.  The rush and hurry and frivolity of society seemed put away and done with; through her open window she could hear the rustling of leaves and the singing of birds;—­the room in which she found herself