Chapter II.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6834, 23 April 1890, Page 1

Chapter 11.

TVHAT CAME OF IT,

Mtß Montresßor was one of thope fortunate women who are completely indepen-

dent of everybody. Her husband, by whom she always fancied she was misunderstood, bad shown his thorough appreciation of her character and inclination by dying before they had been married half a decade of years, and leaving her all the large fortune which his patriotic forbears had amassed by selling unsound bayonets apd delicately constituted sabres to successions of British Governments, unhampered by any conditions whatever. The latter, however, appeared to be an accident, for the draft of a will was also found which reduced her to a bare three hundred a year if she married again; but, aB ifc was neither signed nor witnessed, the original cestament which the old gentleman had made in the first raptures of hia January and May marriage remained good, andtihe inherited the whole, to the entire exclusion of his own relations, who of course hated her heartily in consequence. Children she had none; brothers, "we know, she also had none. Her sisters were married, and lived chiefly in the country. Her mother was dead, and her father had married a second ■wife — a young woman— with, whom she conld never get beyond terms of politeness, and with whom it was impossible she could live in the same house. So she set up house on her own accouab in her husband's big house in Cadogan -square, and aB she couldn't or thought she couldn't live alone, she started acompahion. She soon went through a series of comjtanions, and they were all unsatisfactory.

There was the stupid and melancholy ■variety, the noisy and overpowering, the accomplished who bored her to extinction, the adventuress who tried to use her as a matrimonial stalking-horse, and worst of all, the reduced scion of a noble house whose words were gall and vinegar, who took every opportunity of sneering at people who had made money in " trade," and who was perpetually on the look-out to refuse to do anything " derogatory to her family name." After three or four years of this, she gave it up, and would have married in despair, but that she could not see a man whom she really cared a pin's head about ; and she had a shrewd suspicion that most of the men she came across did not really care a pin's head for her, though of course a large fortune and a handsome -woman were prizes worth gaining if the trouble was not great. So after much dubitation she decided to live alone. She could fill her house with friends, she argued, and need never feel lonely. And there would lie the charm of being completely free and independent. For the first two years it was lovely, and she wondered that she could ever have endured the servitude she had undergone. Of course people shook their heads, and said this and that, with dismal prophecies and scraps from ancient history. But then people always do ; and as no one dared tell her what they said, and she steered her course as straight as her not very experienced head could make it, she neither got into any ecrapes nor had the slightest idea that there was anything to talk about.

At the end of the second year she began to feel justa little lonely. It was dull work, dining alone when she dined at home ; it was dreary work driving home in the small hours from parties to the great empty house, where there was no one to receive her but her servants. Latterly, too, since her horses had been laid up, and she had now and then used cabs in the evening, she had felt quite nervous, when descending at her own door, to think that if any ruffian were lurking in biding up under the dark portico, how completely she would be at his mercy. She had never perhaps felt so lonely as on the night after her adventure in the fog. She was dininp out with her (newest) dearest friend, Lady Kirtlington, a most charming person, who gave the most exquisite parties, and was quite a power in the social world. When I add that she was the wife of a Cabinet Minister, and that her brother had earned considerable distinction in one of our numerous Indian frontier wars, it will be seen that her friendship was worth having. Wot being very good-looking herself, she had a perfect craze for beautiful . people, and noticing Mrs Montressor's lovely face ato ne of those parties where all sets meet, had insisted on an introduction, gushed over her lavishly, and promoted her very rapidly to the place of dearest friend, vice some other pretty woman as suddenly displaced. Ib must be added that abrupt changes of this kind were very common with Lady Kirtlington, and her intimacies were rather of the ephemeral character of Jonah's gourd. However, Mrs Montressor did not know that.

(To be continued.)