class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[33]"/> the Leonetta who had left her Kensington home a year previously.

Nothing had happened to Cleopatra in the meantime, and the elder girl, after having rapidly adopted subtly modified imitations of her sister's style of coiffure, was once again thrust hopelessly into the very position against which her nobler instincts most heartily rebelled. She refused to remain in a relation of tacit, covert, and ill-concealed rivalry to one whom the whole world, including her mother, expected her to love. It was ignominious; it was intolerable. It poisoned her to the very marrow. It made her ache at night when she ought to have been sleeping. Had she been less like Leonetta than she was, had she possessed less passion, less beauty, and less desire than her sister, she could have endured it. As it was the position entailed a perpetual upheaval of her peace of mind.

She was at her wits' end. To face her mother with another scheme for Leonetta's welfare was out of the question. What could she do?

Fortunately for Cleopatra, Leonetta herself brought about the unravelment in a manner sufficiently satisfactory to her sister.

Charming and, in many ways, irresistible as she was, Leonetta had brought back a will of her own from Versailles, and a tongue, too, by means of which she secured that will's highest purposes. During her absence from London, however, her mother had acquired certain habits and tastes, the pursuit of which now frequently clashed with her own plans and ran distinctly counter to her notion of what a mother should be and should do. For Cleopatra had made singularly few claims upon her mother's time all this while, and had never questioned her absolute right to seek her enjoyment when and where she chose.

After a year of this novel experience, during which Mrs. Delarayne had discovered new haunts and new households in which she could behave, even if she were not accepted, as a person who was not of "mediæval antiquity," her taste for this kind of life had developed. Enamoured as this sprightly quinquagenarian had always been of the other sex, and resolute as she was to show that an old war-horse could prance as bravely as a colt to the stirring trumpet call of youth, she had entered heart and soul into an existence which her late husband would have deprecated as strongly as he had once admired the spirit which led her to do it.

Now the sudden intrusion of a full-grown, wilful and extraordinarily vigorous girl of fifteen and a half years upon these newly acquired habits, proved a source of some vexation to the widow; and, love Leonetta as she might, she very quickly discovered that the peace of mind and freedom of action that Cleopatra had allowed her unstintingly were to be despotically withheld by her younger and more exacting offspring.

Cleopatra watched and understood all this. It seemed that Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta were inevitably heading towards a catastrophe; nor did the elder girl take any steps, either by word or deed, to guide either of them to a peaceable adjustment of their differences.

Gradually Leonetta grew to be deliberately rude with her parent, would refuse to fetch and carry for her, was quickly bored over any little personal service performed for her, and did her best in every way to cramp the widow's ever freshly sprouting affection.

At last Cleopatra felt she must put in a word. Her mother was very highly strung, in any case too much so to be exposed constantly to irritation and sorrow. Could she help? Could she speak to Baby?

It was then that Mrs. Delarayne had opened her heart to Cleopatra. No, she had made up her mind. Reluctantly she had been forced to the conclusion that Leonetta must go away,—to a school of domesticity, or of gardening or something,—where she could acquire not only information, but also the discipline which would save her from growing up an impossible woman.

Cleopatra had given vent to a sigh of relief, and with decent slowness and hesitation had ultimately agreed.

A somewhat acrimonious quarrel between Mrs. Delarayne and Leonetta, a day or two after this conversation had taken place, proved to be the determining factor. In her passion Leonetta had declared that she would be as glad as anything to go, if only for company, as it seemed to her that her mother was eternally "gadding about"; and it was only when she was alone in a first-class carriage travelling northward that she regretted this hasty and ill-considered speech.

Another year had passed in this way; Leonetta had by now become, according to the domesticity school reports, an accomplished housekeeper, and, as a girl of seventeen, was on her way home. Coming home!—Cleopatra had dwelt on this homecoming every wakeful hour of the last thirty days, and again she felt that pang, or pain, or strange convulsion of the heart, which she loathed because it humiliated her, and which she combated because it threatened to master her.

Thus did Cleopatra meditate over her lot as she examined her fine, strong, disengaged hand, as she sat in the study on that afternoon in June; and Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility had little to offer her either in comfort or enlightenment.

It was a fine hand she looked at. The fingers were well-shaped, long and even, without any of those thicknesses at the joints which so often mar the beauty of hands even in men. The finger-nails were not too long, and there was a sort of "well-upholstered" fulness of the fingers and palm which spoke of health and latent efficiency. It was not a small hand, or in any case, not too small a hand, and on the inside it possessed those soft corrugations that denote artistic sensibilities.

CHAPTER III

The central offices of Bullion and Bullion Ltd. were in Lombard Street. They occupied a large building constructed of ferroconcrete, on each floor of which, except the first, there was accommodation for hundreds of clerks.

The room occupied by Sir Joseph Bullion, on the first floor, was one of those apartments with very tall mantelpieces and enormous windows, which seem to have been designed for a race of giants. Certainly Sir Joseph himself, unless he had climbed on a chair, could never have rested his elbow against the mantelpiece, nor could he have deposited his cigar thereon without an unusually strenuous effort. The remaining appointments of the room, except for two or three exquisite Stuart cabinets and some priceless old masters on the walls, were designed on the same scale. Sir Joseph's own table, for instance, though of normal height, looked as if it might have been purchased by the acre, while the carpet, a huge Turkey, presented an enormously long pile, as soft as moss, to the feet. Even the chair on which the head of the firm sat was exceptionally large, and seemed to offer its occupant the constant alternative of definitely selecting either one or the other side of the extensive surface which lay between its arms.

Opposite him at a smaller table sat his chief private secretary, Denis Malster, a pale, clean-shaven, intelligent-looking young man, with mouse-coloured hair, grey eyes, and somewhat thin lips. Certainly Mrs. Delarayne must have been right about his sense of humour, for a pleasant twinkle played about his eyes, even while he was at work, which gave him the air of one amused by what he was doing.

Sir Joseph did not pretend to understand the people who served him; but having been hard driven himself in his day, he had a pretty shrewd notion of the power he could safely exercise over them, and of the duties, supplementary to the office routine, which he could reasonably induce them to fulfil. To make fourths at tennis or at bridge, to fill a gap at a