On a hot morning in the early summer Mr. Germen found two or three—­two of them of larger size and seeming to contain business papers.  These he placed where they would be seen at once.  Mr. Vanderpoel was a little later than usual in his arrival.  At this season he came from his place in the country, and before leaving it this morning he had been talking to his wife, whom he found rather disturbed by a chance encounter with a young woman who had returned to visit her mother after a year spent in England with her English husband.  This young woman, now Lady Bowen, once Milly Jones, had been one of the amusing marvels of New York.  A girl neither rich nor so endowed by nature as to be able to press upon the world any special claim to consideration as a beauty, her enterprise, and the daring of her tactics, had been the delight of many a satiric onlooker.  In her schooldays she had ingenuously mapped out her future career.  Other American girls married men with titles, and she intended to do the same thing.  The other little girls laughed, but they liked to hear her talk.  All information regarding such unions as was to be found in the newspapers and magazines, she collected and studiously read—­sometimes aloud to her companions.

Social paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she devoured and learned by heart.  An abominably vulgar little person, she was an interestingly pertinacious creature, and wrought night and day at acquiring an air of fashionable elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms.  How the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible sources had been less numerous.  The air was full of it, the literature of the day, the chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour.  Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish frankness, and realised that it might easily be detrimental to her ambitions.  She said no more of her plans for her future, and even took the astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little past.  But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without setting her small, but business-like, brain at work.  Her lack of wealth and assured position made her situation rather hopeless.  She was not of the class of lucky young women whose parents’ gorgeous establishments offered attractions to wandering persons of rank.  She and her mother lived in a flat, and gave rather pathetic afternoon teas in return for such more brilliant hospitalities as careful and pertinacious calling and recalling obliged their acquaintances to feel they could not decently be left wholly out of.  Milly and her anxious mother had worked hard.  They lost no opportunity of writing a note, or sending a Christmas card, or an economical