There were melancholy associations for Sir Vernon Lawford in this wing which he had added to South Hill. He had built it to give pleasure to his first wife, an heiress, and the most amiable of women: but before the building was finished the first Lady Lawford was in her grave, leaving a baby girl of two months old behind her. The widower grieved intensely; but he proved no exception to the general rule that the more intense the sorrow of the bereaved the more speedily does he or she seek consolation in new ties. Sir Vernon married again within two years of his wife’s death; and, this time, instead of giving satisfaction to the county by choosing one of the best born and wealthiest ladies within its length and breadth, he picked up his wife somewhere on the Continent—a fact which in the opinion of the county was much in her disfavour—and when he brought her home and introduced her to his friends, he was singularly reticent as to her previous history. The county people shrugged their shoulders, and doubted if this marriage would end well. They had some years later the morbid satisfaction of being able to say that they had prophesied aright. The second Lady Lawford bore her husband two children, a boy and a girl, and within a year of her daughter’s birth mysteriously disappeared. She went to the South of France, it was said, for her lungs; though everybody’s latest recollection of her was of a young woman in the heyday of health, strength, and beauty; somewhat self-willed, very extravagant, inordinately fond of pleasure, and governing her husband with the insolence of conscious beauty. From that southern journey she never came back. Nobody ever heard any explicit account of her death; yet after two or three years it became an accepted fact that she was dead. Sir Vernon travelled a good deal, while his maiden sister kept house for him at South Hill, and superintended the rearing of his children. Madoline, daughter and heiress of the first Lady Lawford, was brought up and educated at home. Loftus, the boy, went to a private tutor at Stratford, and thence to Rugby, where he fell ill and died. Daphne’s childhood and early girlhood were spent almost entirely at school. Only a week ago she was still at Asnières, grinding away at the everlasting prosy old books, reciting Lafontaine’s fables, droning out long singsong speeches from Athalie or Iphigénie, teasing poor patient Miss Toby, domineering over Martha Dibb. And now her education was supposed to be finished, and she was free—free to roam like a wild thing about the lovely grounds at South Hill, in the water-meadows where the daffodils grew in such rank luxuriance; and where, years ago, when she was a little child, and had crowned herself with a chaplet of those yellow flowers, scarcely brighter than her hair, a painter-friend of her father’s had called her Asphodel.