A confiding young lady from the States was required,
he said on one occasion, but it would be necessary that she should be a
young person of much simplicity, who would not be alarmed or chilled by
the obvious. No one would realise this more clearly than Mount Dunstan
himself. He said it coldly and casually, as if it were the simplest
matter of fact. If the fellow had been making himself agreeable
to Betty, it was as well that certain points should be--as it were
inadvertently--brought before her.
Miss Vanderpoel was really rather fine, people said to each other
afterwards, when she entered the ballroom at Dunholm Castle with her
brother-in-law. She bore herself as composedly as if she had been
escorted by the most admirable and dignified of conservative relatives,
instead of by a man who was more definitely disliked and disapproved of
than any other man in the county whom decent people were likely to meet.
Yet, she was far too clever a girl not to realise the situation clearly,
they said to each other. She had arrived in England to find her sister a
neglected wreck, her fortune squandered, and her existence stripped bare
of even such things as one felt to be the mere decencies. There was but
one thing to be deduced from the facts which had stared her in the
face.
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