“There is no doubt that at the time of old Checkfield’s death, Alice looked upon herself as the young man’s _fiancée_. When the girl reached her nineteenth year, it was at last decided that she should leave school and come to England. The question as to what should be done with her until her majority, or until she married Hubert, was a great puzzle to Mr. Turnour. He was a bachelor, who lived in comfortable furnished rooms in Reading, and he did not at all relish the idea of starting housekeeping for the sake of his young ward, whom he had not seen since she was out of the nursery, and whom he looked upon as an intolerable nuisance. “Fortunately for him this vexed question was most satisfactorily and unexpectedly settled by Alice herself. She wrote to her guardian, from Geneva, that a Mrs. Brackenbury, the mother of her dearest schoolfellow had asked her to come and live with them, at any rate for a time, as this would be a more becoming arrangement than that of a young girl sharing a bachelor’s establishment. “Mr. Turnour seems to have hesitated for some time: he was a conscientious sort of man, who took his duties of guardianship very seriously. What ultimately decided him, however, was that his brother Hubert added the weight of his eloquent letters of appeal to those of Alice herself. Hubert naturally was delighted at the idea of having his rich _fiancée_ under his eye in London, and after a good deal of correspondence, Mr. Turnour finally gave his consent, and Alice Checkfield duly arrived from Switzerland in order to make a prolonged stay in Mrs. Brackenbury’s house.” Chapter II “All seems to have gone on happily and smoothly for a time in Mrs. Brackenbury’s pretty house in Kensington,” continued the man in the corner. “Hubert Turnour was a constant visitor there, and the two young people seem to have had all the freedom of an engaged couple. “Alice Checkfield was in no sense of the word an attractive girl; she was not good-looking, and no effort on Mrs. Brackenbury’s part could succeed in making her look stylish. Still, Hubert Turnour seemed quite satisfied, and the girl herself ready enough at first to continue the boy and girl flirtation as of old. “Soon, however, as time went on, things began to change. Now that Alice had become mistress of a comfortable fortune, there were plenty of people ready to persuade her that a ‘commission agent,’ with but vague business prospects, was not half good enough for her, and that her £80,000 entitled her to more ambitious matrimonial hopes. Needless to say that in these counsels Mrs. Brackenbury was very much to the fore. “She lived in Kensington, and had social ambitions, foremost among which was to see her daughter’s bosom friend married to, at least, a baronet, if not a peer.