He was such a good-looking young soldier in those days. I specially remember him at the late Queen’s funeral--one of the tallest men in the British army, and with that peculiar charm of manner which, alas! one has ceased to associate with young Englishmen nowadays. If to these two undeniable advantages you add the one that Hubert de Mazareen was the dearly loved grandson of Sir Jeremiah Baddock, the multi-millionaire shipowner of Liverpool, you will realise how easy it was for that young Guardsman to ingratiate himself with every woman in Society, and more particularly with every mamma who had a marriageable daughter. But Fate and Love have a proverbial knack of making a muddle of things. Captain de Mazareen, with a bevy of pretty and eligible girls from whom to select a wife, chose to fall in love with the one woman in the whole of England who, in his grandfather’s opinion, should have remained a stranger, even an enemy, to him. You remember the sad story--more than a quarter of a century old now--of Sir Jeremiah’s unhappy second marriage with the pretty French actress, Mlle. Adèle Desty, who was then over thirty years younger than himself. He married her abroad, and never brought her to England. She made him supremely wretched for about three years, and finally ran away with the Earl of Flintshire, whom she had met at Monte Carlo. Well! it was with a daughter of that same Earl of Flintshire, Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, that Captain Hubert de Mazareen fell desperately in love. Imagine Sir Jeremiah’s feelings when he heard of it. Captain Hubert, you must know, had resigned his commission in 1902 at his grandfather’s request, when the latter’s health first began to fail. He had taken up his permanent abode at Appledore Castle, Sir Jeremiah’s magnificent home in Cumberland, and, of course, it was generally understood that ultimately he would become possessed of the wealthy shipowner’s millions as well as of the fine property, seeing that his mother had been Sir Jeremiah’s only child by the latter’s first marriage. Lord Flintshire’s property was quite close to Appledore; but, needless to say, old Sir Jeremiah never forgave his noble neighbour the cruel wrong he had suffered at his hands. The second Lady Baddock, afterwards Countess of Flintshire, has been dead twenty years. Neither the county nor the more exclusive sets of London ever received her, but her daughter Molly, who inherited all her beauty and none of her faults, was the idol of her father, and the acknowledged queen of county and town Society. You see, it was the ancient, yet ever new, story of Cappelletti and Montecchi over again, and one day Captain Hubert de Mazareen had to tell Sir Jeremiah that he desired to marry the daughter of his grandfather’s most cruel enemy.