E-text prepared by Al Haines Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original musical notations. See 26044-h.htm or 26044-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/6/0/4/26044/26044-h/26044-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/6/0/4/26044/26044-h.zip) PETER AND JANE Or The Missing Heir by S. MACNAUGHTAN Author of 'The Fortune of Christina M'nab' Sixth Edition Methuen & Co. Ltd. 36 Essex Street W.C. London First Issued in this Cheap Form (Fourth Edition) . . . . . . . . . . . . July 2nd 1914 Fifth Edition . . . . . . . . . . . May 1916 Sixth Edition . . . . . . . . . . . 1919 First Published (Crown 8vo) . . . . September 14th 1911 Second Edition . . . . . . . . . . . September 1911 Third Edition . . . . . . . . . . . November 1911 TO CATHERINE PETER AND JANE CHAPTER I Mrs. Ogilvie, red-haired according to the exact shade then in fashion, and dressed by Paquin, sat in her drawing-room reading the _Court Journal_. She was a woman who thought on the lines of Aristotle, despised most other women except Charlotte Corday, Judith, Joan of Arc, and a few more, and she dyed her hair and read the _Court Journal_. People who did not know her sometimes alluded to her as an overdressed woman with a wig. Those who had met her even but once admitted the power of her personality. Perhaps if any one had known her very well he or she would have been bewildered by the many-sided complexities of her character, and would have failed to discover any sort of unity behind its surprising differences. But then, as a matter of fact, no one did know her well. Those who cared to remember such an old story used to tell how, as a girl of eighteen, she had been deeply in love with a cousin of hers, Greville Monsen by name, and how almost on the eve of her marriage she had thrown him over and had married Colonel Ogilvie the explorer, a man twenty years older than herself, with an enormous fortune, and accounted something of a hero at the time. Colonel Ogilvie married late in life, and his brother's wife had long ago decided that it would be better if he should never marry at all. Mrs. Lionel Ogilvie was an ambitious woman with a fine family of sons and daughters to whom Colonel Ogilvie's large estates and immense fortune would have been wholly appropriate. She had always been civil to her brother-in-law, although the estates and the money were entailed upon his brother, and she weighed in the balance the disinterested affection which she showed him against her feeling of satisfaction in the fact that he was a daring and indefatigable traveller; one, moreover, who was seldom quite happy unless he was in danger, and who never thoroughly enjoyed a journey if any other white man had trodden the ground before he himself visited it.