There was a certain jauntiness about Kitty which became her, where in almost any one else it might have seemed outrageous. Even Miss Abingdon always remembered that Kitty had lost her mother when she was four years old, and since then had been the playmate and boon companion of a man who had been accounted fast even in the go-ahead set in which he lived, and who had taken his daughter to every race meeting in England since the time when she could first sit beside him on the front seat of his coach. He had never allowed her to go to school, and he had dismissed half a dozen governesses in turn because they were trying to make a prim little miss of her, and because they always insisted on pouring out tea for him as if they expected him to marry them. When Kitty was sixteen he dismissed 'the whole bothering lot of old women' and finished her education himself. Lord Sherard spoke French like a native, and was one of the best riders and sportsmen of his day. He faithfully conveyed all that he knew to his daughter, with the result that Kitty had more knowledge of French literature than of English, and she and her father conversed but little with each other in their native tongue. But the result as far as Kitty was concerned was that she had turned out a beautiful and engaging young woman with eyes that looked frankly and charitably on the world. She loved you so much that she nearly always had her arm linked in yours when she told her absurd little stories; and she smiled so delightedly when you saw the joke of them, that even when you said, 'Well, really, Kitty!' you knew quite well that hers was a sort of innocence of daring, and you warned her severely that she must be very careful indeed to whom she said things like that, but that of course it didn't matter a bit as far as you yourself were concerned, because you understood her and loved her. And because everybody else said exactly the same sort of thing to her, and because no one would have ventured to crush that blithe and childlike nature by one word of real disapproval, there was not much hope that Kitty would ever reform and become sober-minded and well-behaved and satisfactory. The plague of it was that you couldn't help loving her whatever she did, and she loved you too, which was perfectly intoxicating when you came to think of it, except that you knew that she loved at least a hundred different people in exactly the same sort of way. She kept her real affection for her father and Jane Erskine, and lately she had fallen in love--which is a different thing--with Sir Nigel Christopherson.