The poor lady had died, it
seemed, in the room which Mary now occupied, probably in the same bed.
Mary deeply pitied her if she had been long in dying. The wall-paper was
atrocious, with a thousand hideous faces to be worried out of it by
tired eyes. The girl had wondered why the money had been left entirely
to her, but now she guessed in a flash why the Home-Davises had had none
of it. The years in this Cromwell house had been too long.
"We've always imagined that Cousin Katherine must have been in love with
your father, Uncle Basil, before he married," said Elinor, when they
had reached the heavy stage of sweet pudding; "and when the will was
read, we were sure of it. For, of course, mother was just as nearly
related to her as uncle Basil was."
It was difficult for Mary to realize that this Aunt Sara could be a
sister of the handsome, dark-faced man with burning eyes whose features
had remained cameo-clear in her memory since childhood. But Mrs.
Home-Davis was the ugly duckling of a handsome and brilliant family, an
accident of fate which had embittered her youth, and indirectly her
daughter's.
"How shall I get away from them?" Mary asked herself, desperately, that
night. But fate was fighting for her in the form of a man she had never
seen, a man not even in London at the moment.
In a room below Mary's Elinor was asking Mrs. Home-Davis how they could
get rid of the convent cousin.
"She won't do," the young woman said.
"She reminds me of her mother," remarked Mrs.
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