“Oh, sir,” she began, “sure I see you can guess!” She sobbed aloud, and the tears poured down her pale cheeks. “She was took off in her sleep about sunrise. Me mother is dead!” CHAPTER XV The letter (for it was altogether too serious and strange a story to telegraph) which reached Lady Mulgrave, relating the fact that Mary Foley was Joseline Dene, disturbed her to such a degree that she was compelled to plead a shocking headache, and lunch as well as breakfast, in her own apartments. It took her some time to attempt to realise a stepdaughter, aged twenty-one, Irish, uneducated, vulgar, and tawdry. _What_ could she do with the creature? A social atrocity, a well-born deformity! A girl with the best blood of France and England in her veins, and the ideas, aspirations, and deportment of a kitchen-maid! Oh, she felt as if the foundations of her position, were being upheaved. If it were only possible to marry the creature, and get her out of the way! But who would care to be the husband of a horror who spoke with a common brogue, probably took sevens in gloves, dressed in emerald green, and had a passion for turf and potatoes? This discovery was crushing. It seemed to threaten a hopeless state of affairs--a lifelong incubus! Yes, and an incubus who would take the precedence of Tito, and perhaps engage the somewhat flickering attentions of Tito’s cavaliers!--not because of what she was, but of what she would ultimately be--Baroness Marchlyde in her own right, and heiress of many thousands per annum. Apparently there was no mistake about the matter. A sworn information, a legal witness! Alas! there was no escape in that direction. If the girl had been brought up under her father’s roof it would have been a different affair; but twenty-one years in a dirty Irish mud cabin (impossible to dissociate the idea of mud and dirt from anything Irish)--it was too awful to contemplate. The abominable old foster-mother deserved to be hanged; but hanging and capital punishment she had cleverly evaded by death! There was one small consolation: this new, uneducated person would be easily kept in the background; she resembled the horse and elephant, and was entirely ignorant of her own power, and ignorant she should remain. Lady Mulgrave was a woman who had acquired a special gift for repressing people. In the sweetest and most charming and smiling fashion she could administer the cruellest snubs; her rudeness of speech and manner at times bordered on brutality. To those whom she wished to “put down” or cast out from her circle, to any pushing nouveau riche, or dangerous rival, her affronts were as terrible and as ferocious, in their way, as if she were an East End virago, battering an enemy with a chair or a saucepan.