"I am ashamed to say that I know very little about her; I am simply furious with myself for having asked them at all. I don't often yield to kind-hearted impulses, and I'm sure I'm punished enough this time." Lady Groombridge gave a snort. "But who is she? Is she one of the Malcot Dexters?" "Yes; I can tell you that much. She is the daughter of a John Dexter I used to know a little. He died many years ago, not very long after divorcing his wife, and this poor girl was brought up by an aunt, and Sir Edmund says she had a bad time of it. Then she made one of those odd arrangements people make nowadays, to be taken about by this Mrs. Delaport Green, and I met them at Aunt Emily's, and, of course, I thought they were all right and asked them to come here. After that I heard a little more about the girl from some one in London; I can't remember who it was now." "Poor thing," said Rose; "she looks as if she had had a sad childhood. But what curious eyes; I find her looking through and through me." "Yes; you have evidently got a marked attraction for her." "Repulsion, I should have called it," said Rose, with her gentle laugh. Lady Groombridge laughed too, and got up to go to bed. "And what became of the mother?" "She is living--" said the other; then she caught her sleeve in the table very clumsily, and was a moment or two disengaging the lace. "She is living," she then said rather slowly, "in Paris, I think it is, but this girl has never seen her." "How dreadful!" "Yes. Good-night, Rose; do get to bed quickly,--a wise remark when it is I who have been keeping you up!" Lady Groombridge, when she got to her own room, murmured to herself: "I only stopped just in time. I nearly said Florence, and that is where the other wicked woman lives. It's odd they should both live in Florence. But--how absurd, I'm half asleep--it would be much odder if there were not two wicked women in Florence." Sir Edmund was aware as soon as he took his seat by Molly at the breakfast-table that she knew why Lady Groombridge was pouring out tea with a dark countenance. He put a plate of omelette in his own place, and then asked if Molly needed anything. As she answered in the negative he murmured as he sat down: "Mrs. Delaport Green is not down?" "She has a furious toothache." Molly's look answered his. "I suppose there is no such thing as a dentist left in London on Easter Monday?" No more was safe just then; but by common consent they moved out on to the terrace as soon as they had finished breakfast. "It is too tiresome, too silly, too wrong," said Molly. "Yes; the pet vice should be left at home," said Edmund. "Many of them do it because it's fashionable, but this one must have it in the blood. I saw her begin to play, and she was a different creature when she touched the cards. What sort of repentence is there?"