Produced by Darleen Dove, Shannon Barker, Matthew Wheaton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) A MERE CHANCE. A NOVEL. BY ADA CAMBRIDGE, AUTHOR OF "IN TWO YEARS TIME," &c. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON, Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 1882. _Right of Translation Reserved._ CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER I.--A Marshal Neil Rose II.--Family Counsels III.--Mr. Kingston's Question IV.--The Answer V.--So Soon! VI.--A Rash Promise VII.--Two Love Letters VIII.--How Rachel Met "Him" IX.--A Black Sheep X.--Outside the Pale XI.--Mr. Dalrymple has to Consult Gordon XII.--"Oh, if they had!" A MERE CHANCE. CHAPTER I. A MARSHAL NEIL ROSE. A few years ago there was a young _débutante_ in Melbourne whose name was Rachel Fetherstonhaugh. She had risen upon the social horizon suddenly, like a new star--or, one might almost say, like a comet, so unusually bright was she, and so much talked about; and no one quite knew where she had come from. Mrs. Hardy had introduced her as her niece--everyone knew that--but there were sceptics who, having never heard of female relatives previously (except the three daughters, who had married so well), declared that she might be "anybody," picked up merely for matchmaking purposes--it being well understood that Mrs. Hardy had for an unknown period sustained life, figuratively speaking, upon the stimulus of matrimonial intrigues, and had now no more daughters to provide for. That this pretty creature had been unseen and unsuspected until the last Miss Hardy, as Mrs. Buxton, was fairly away on her honeymoon, and almost immediately after had been introduced to society as Mrs. Buxton's successor, was a kind of circumstance that seemed, of course, bound to have a mystery at the bottom of it. But, as a matter of fact, there was no mystery. Rachel Fetherstonhaugh was a _bona-fide_ niece, and her entrance into the Hardy family at a particular juncture could be quite easily accounted for. Her father had been Mrs. Hardy's brother--a good-for-nothing, unlucky brother, whose clever brains could do anything but earn money, and whose pockets could no more hold it than a sieve could hold water--a brother whom, long ago, before she had become rich and fastidious, Mrs. Hardy had loved, and served, and worked for, but whom, of late years, she had--with some mild self-reproach for doing so--ignored as far as possible.