to look after the little motherless infant, at whom the elegant Ned barely glanced, during her days of babyhood; and she redeemed her promise well. It is unnecessary to inquire into the career of Mr. Guyon between the period of Katharine's birth and that of her _début_ in society. It was evident that, however well-founded his anticipations of success, it had not been in the matrimonial direction; and indeed some rather amusing anecdotes were current in society concerning "Ned's" audacious attempts and egregious failures. His wife's relatives had never particularly admired Mr. Guyon; but they were kindly, unaffected people; and Mrs. Guyon had been strictly and uniformly silent on all her domestic concerns; so that, though they surmised that the brief marriage had not been the altogether ecstatic union Isabella had imagined it would prove, they had nothing but surmise in their minds respecting it; and they never thought of withholding from the motherless girl any of the advantages derivable from their social position and influence. These were far more important to Katharine's father than her guileless uncles, aunts, and cousins imagined--to whom a life of shifts, scheming, and pretence was an utterly unknown and unsuspected possibility--and much more important too to Katharine herself, as regulating her father's conduct towards her, than the girl ever knew or dreamed of. She would probably have been placed economically out of sight, at a foreign boarding-school, and left there to attain the age of womanhood, unnoticed by her father, had not the kind relatives under whose care her early childhood had been happily passed given her consequence in Mr. Guyon's eyes, causing him to regard her as a valuable possession, a court-card in fact. So, instead of a cheap foreign school being selected as an _oubliette_ for the child,--in virtue of whom Mr. Guyon had a seat at the tables of many who were more great than wise,--an expensive establishment for young ladies in the Regent's Park was honoured by Mrs. Stanbourne's choice; and there Katharine was brilliantly, if not solidly educated, the larger portion of the _pension_ and her personal expenses being paid by her uncle. In Katharine's early girlhood the Hon. Philip Stanbourne died; and she sustained by this calamity a double loss: not only that of her kind relative and friend, but of her aunt's counsel, training, and protection in the perilous time which lay before her,--the time of early womanhood, and her entrance into society. The widow went abroad with her daughter, who was some years older than Katharine; and though she was in London when the events just related took place, she was not likely to be again a settled resident in England, as her daughter had married an Austrian nobleman, high in the diplomatic world, and desired to have as much of her mother's society as possible.