"Your grandfather was a very poor and very proud English baronet--Sir Arthur Montavon. My wife Elsie and your mother were his only children, and they were twins. They were presented at Court together, created an equal sensation, and were at once allowed to be the beauties of the season. This was the time when I first knew them, so it is here that I begin my tale. "Six months after their appearance in Society, Elsie was engaged to be married to me. But your mother seemed to be more difficult to please. She refused several very good offers, and at the end of her first season she was still free. "I don't know exactly how or where she first met him," Lord Langerdale continued slowly; "but before the following spring your mother was betrothed to the Count de Cartienne. At that time he was one of the richest, the best-looking, and most popular men about town. There seemed to be nothing which he could not do, no art in which he was not proficient, and he was passionately in love with your mother. Whether she ever really cared for him I cannot tell; but if she did, it could only have been a very transitory feeling. "The marriage-day was fixed and was a general topic of conversation. I even believe that your mother had begun to prepare her trousseau, when something happened. Count de Cartienne was deposed from his post of chief favourite in Society, which he at one time held, by a younger and more extraordinary man. That man was----" "Mr. Ravenor!" I exclaimed. Lord Langerdale nodded. "I don't think," he went on, "that you can possibly imagine from the Mr. Ravenor of to-day what he was when he became the rage of London Society. He had just returned from his first journey in the East, after some perilous adventures, which had filled the columns of the newspapers for weeks and had already created a strong curiosity about him. I met him, I think, on the first evening he entered a London drawing-room, and I will never forget it. "He was as handsome as a Greek god, with limbs magnificently developed by his hardy, vigorous life and rigid asceticism, with the head of a Byron, the manners of a Grandison, and the fire and eloquence of a Burke, when he chose to open his mouth. "Men and women alike were fascinated, which was all the more remarkable as he sought no intimate amongst the former, and studiously avoided compromising himself with any of the latter, although, Heaven knows, he had no lack of opportunity. The only man with whom he seemed to be on at all friendly terms was de Cartienne; and the only woman to whom he paid any save the most ordinary attention was your mother." Lord Langerdale paused for several moments and seemed wrapped in a brown study, from which my impatience aroused him. He continued at once: