London in course of time, where they were soon safely housed with their grandmother, Lady Drumloch.

My Lady Drumloch was, as all the world knows, a very great lady, and back in the days of King Charles the Second had been a beauty and a toast. The daughter of a duke and the wife of an earl, she had queened it in two courts, had gone into exile with King James, intrigued and plotted with the Jacobites, and finally, having lost husband and son and fortune in her devotion to a hopeless cause, had made her peace with Queen Anne and returned to England to eke out her last years in the soul-crushing poverty of the great.

But as with her she brought her two granddaughters, the Honorable Margaret Moffat and Lady Prudence Wynne, her meager little house on the outskirts of May fair soon became not only the Mecca of other Jacobites as aristocratic and as poor as herself, but of many who were neither Jacobites nor in reduced circumstances. Among both classes the Lady Prudence, though but fifteen, soon found courtiers to pick and choose from. The saucy child with her skin of milk and roses, her tangle of dark curling locks and her wonderful blue eyes, was already possessed of that mysterious charm of femininity by which the world has been swayed since the days of Eve.

To gratify her grandmother's ambition, and at the same time emancipate herself from the restrictions of the school-room, she married the Viscount Brooke, heir of the Earl of Overbridge. But the marriage resulted disastrously. The viscount had long before exhausted his private means, and although his father, hoping that marriage would sober and settle him, made a sufficiently liberal allowance to the young couple, a few months of reckless extravagance and gaiety plunged them in an ocean of debt, from which the viscount, in a fit of delirium, extricated himself by means of a bullet in his brain, leaving Prue a widow at sixteen with no home but her grandmother's little house in Mayfair, and not a penny beyond the grudging bounty of her father-in-law.

Still, it was delightful to be a widow, and, consequently, free from all authority. Having curtailed her mourning within the scantiest limits, she returned to society with renewed ardor, where her youth and beauty, enhanced by her widowhood, secured her a flattering welcome. She played the hostess in Lady Drumloch's shabby drawing-rooms, filling them with laughter, scandal and love-making. She chaperoned Margaret Moffat, who was ten years her senior and who loved her with the infatuation one sometimes, if rarely, observes in a very plain woman for a very beautiful one.

Poor as she notoriously was, the oft-repeated rumors of Prue's engagement to one or another of her wealthy admirers enabled her to run into debt time and again for such necessaries of existence as fashionable dresses and costly jewels, for which she certainly never expected to pay out of her own pocket. Nay, even money-lenders, beguiled by her bright eyes and her unquestionably promising matrimonial prospects, had furnished the sinews of war (for which her future husband would have to pay right royally), and this despite the fact that the Lady Prudence Brooke, widowed at sixteen, was still a widow at two-and-twenty.

Lady Drumloch's granddaughters were not expected at her town-house, and when the hired cabriolet in which they arrived drew up at her door, the ancient butler was divided between joy at the sight of the two bright young faces, and trepidation as to the welcome they might expect from the higher powers. Mrs. Lowton, my lady's waiting-woman, was troubled by no such complex emotions. She made little attempt to conceal her own dissatisfaction or to disguise the fact that the old countess was in no humor for gay company.

"My lady has had an awful attack of gout," she averred, "and the doctors have ordered the strictest quiet. The least agitation might be fatal."

"We will be as quiet as mice, Lowton," said Lady Prudence, ostentatiously tiptoeing across the narrow hall and up the steep stairs. "James, pay the coachman and let me know how much I owe you."

The butler obeyed, though with no great alacrity. "Her ladyship ain't long getting back to her old tricks," he muttered with rather a wry smile, as he hunted through his pockets for the coach-hire. "I gave the man two shillings—and sixpence for himself," he said, coming back promptly. "I suppose your ladyship has not forgotten that before you went to Yorkshire—"

"Oh! never mind that, James," she interrupted hastily. "Let bygones be bygones, and when I come into my fortune you will see whether I forget anything. Come, Peggie, let us get to bed. I am fainting for want of sleep."

"I am fainting, too," retorted Miss Moffat, "but more with hunger than sleep. Lowton, for the love of Heaven, order some breakfast, and that speedily."

"I'll see what I can do, Miss Margaret," said Lowton, without enthusiasm, "but her ladyship keeps us closer than ever, and I doubt if there's anything for breakfast but milk and bread."

The cousins crept softly up to the little room on the top floor, where their dismantled beds and the bare floors gave so much evidence of disuse and so little promise of hospitality that the most courageous hearts might have sunk a little.

"We were better off at Bleakmoor, even with the bailiffs in attendance," said Prue piteously.

"Mayhap—but there we were out of help's way, and here, if we will—or rather if you will—there is succor at hand," said the undaunted Peggie—"and even while I speak of rescue, here comes my dear old Lowton with food for the starving and sheets and blankets for the weary. Come, coz, eat and sleep, and when you wake you will be ready for any emergency."

It was evening before the tired travelers rose, and, ransacking wardrobes and closets for the wherewithal to replace their soiled and dusty traveling attire, made themselves presentable for the inevitable visit of ceremony to their grandmother.

Quiet as they had been, the old lady had become aware of their arrival long before the faithful Lowton ventured, in lugubrious whispers, to communicate the news.

"There is no necessity, my good Lowton, for you to apologize for my granddaughters," Lady Drumloch had interrupted, almost before the first word was uttered. "No doubt I shall have to listen to half-a-dozen different stories before I get at the true cause of this visit, so you may as well spare yourself the trouble of inventing excuses for you know not what. Let me know when the travelers rise, and I will receive them and hear what they have to say for themselves."

The venerable countess lay in a huge four-poster bed, propped high with pillows scarcely whiter than her waxen face, upon which still lingered some of the beauty and all of the indomitable hauteur of the belle of half-a-century ago. Her scant and snowy locks were concealed under a cap of priceless lace and ruffles of the same fell over her small ivory-white hands. At the ceremonious announcement of the Viscountess Brooke and the Honorable Miss Moffat, she slightly moved her head on the pillow and turned her bright, dark eyes from one to the other.

"To what do I owe the honor of this visit, my lady Viscountess?" she inquired dryly.

"Partly, dear Grandmother, to our anxiety about your ladyship's health," said Prudence, sweeping so deep a curtsey that she seemed to be falling on her knees, "and partly because a whole long year in the wilds of Yorkshire hath