rendezvous for the busy and the idle, for the sweethearts and the gossips, of the village where the much-respected widow had been born and bred. CHAPTER II. THE ANTECEDENTS OF MILADY. The Lady Millicent Vavasour, whose proceedings were thus so freely commented upon by her inferiors, was the only child of the rich and potent Earl of Gillingham. That nobleman, who survived the Countess, his wife, but little more than a year, bequeathed at his decease, with restrictions and a good deal _à contre cœur_, all that he possessed, in land, mines, personalty, and otherwise, to his only child, the Lady Millicent aforesaid and in the last chapter duly commented upon. The income produced by the above-mentioned properties--of all of which the heiress came into undisputed possession at the age of twenty-three--amounted at a moderate computation to thirty thousand pounds per annum. The Lady Millicent Vavasour therefore took her stand on the platform of public estimation with the _prestige_ of being one of the richest heiresses in England. As might naturally be expected, the eyes of the world and eke the monster’s tongue had from her earliest womanhood a good deal to look and say on the subject of the Lady Millicent’s future disposition in marriage. That she would--like the Maiden Queen of mighty memory, or the banker’s heiress of nineteenth-century renown--be content to enjoy her power _alone_, no one appeared for a single moment to imagine. There exist, always have existed, and probably always will exist, a large proportion of the bolder sex of whom it is averred, and safely too, that they are not “marrying men;” but whoever in his or her experience--and I say it without prejudice--has heard of a “non-marrying woman”? Such a being, if it were discovered to exist, would be an anomaly, a _lusus naturæ_, a freak, so to speak, of the mighty mother who has done all things not only wondrously, but “decently and in order.” But if there be a class of females likely to “go in,” as the saying is, for celibacy, that class is the _genus_ heiress. There are causes too numerous to mention that may account for this established fact: the watchfulness alike of friends and foes; a natural as well as a cultivated suspicion that “_men_ are not (always) what they seem;” the difficulties attendant on an _embarras de choix_; and last, but by no means least in importance, the fear of being reduced to a second-rate power,--may all be cited as good and sufficient reasons for the delay which so frequently occurs in the “going off” of an heiress. As regarded the Lady Millicent Vavasour, the rich _partie par excellence_ of this story, the last-mentioned cause was, far and away beyond the rest, the one to which might be attributed the important fact that she had reached the age of twenty-four while still a single woman.