"She asked him in May to stay with us in Scotland in September, but he has refused. I found she had given a little message from me which I never sent. Poor, poor mother, and poor me!" "And poor millionaire! Surely if he has any sense he must see that it is your mother and not you who is hunting him." "He is aware that Cecily did as she was told. He probably thinks I could be coerced into marrying him. He may know a great deal about finance, and stocks, and all those weary things, but he knows very little about women. He has not taken much account of them so far." "His day will come," said Mrs Trefusis. "What a nuisance men are! I wish they were all at the bottom of the sea." "If they were," said Anne, with her rueful little smile, "mother would order a diving-bell at once." CHAPTER III "O mighty love, O passion and desire, That bound the cord." --_The Heptameron._ Janet's mother had died when Janet was a toddling child. It is observable in the natural history of heroines that their mothers almost invariably do die when the heroines to whom they have given birth are toddling children. Had Di Vernon a mother, or Evelina, or Jane Eyre, or Diana of the Crossways, or Aurora Leigh? Dear Elizabeth Bennett certainly had one whom we shall not quickly forget--but Elizabeth is an exception. She only proves the rule for the majority of heroines. Fathers they have sometimes, generally of a feeble or callous temperament, never of any use in extricating their daughters from the entanglements that early beset them. And occasionally they have chivalrous or disreputable brothers. So it is with a modest confidence in the equipment of my heroine that I now present her to the reader denuded of both parents, and domiciled under the roof of a brother who was not only disreputable in the imagination of Mrs Trefusis, but, as I hate half measures, was so in reality.