Lady Catherine was a reddish-haired, freckled little girl of sixteen, very plump and very merry looking. “Oh, wherever Rees Pennant is, I suppose,” answered her eldest sister, Elizabeth, glancing out of window between the stitches of crewel work over which she was bending. Lady Elizabeth was, like her younger sister, round-cheeked and blue-eyed; she had a fair complexion, golden hair, eyebrows and eye lashes, a self-satisfied expression, and a figure which all the back-boards, reclining boards, and all the dancing masters in Europe could never have saved from being round-shouldered and “dumpy.” Lady Catherine burst into a merry laugh, and from a sofa in the shadier depths of the long room a plaintive, but cracked, voice wailed out a request in French that “miladi Katte” would be quieter, and would remember that “madame la comtesse,” her mother, wished her to overcome her propensity to unladylike outbursts of merriment. Mademoiselle de Laval, the duenna of the earl’s daughters, had been specially chosen for the post for her abnormal ugliness, Lord St. Austell holding that women’s virtue was always in inverse proportion to their beauty. He had over-reached himself, however, for mademoiselle, being a martyr to neuralgia and rheumatism, and finding herself very comfortable in her Welsh home, would not for worlds have endangered her situation by any indiscreet prying into the amusements of her charges. Lady Kate, with a grimace in her direction, crossed the room to her sister, and sat down on a footstool by her side, with a scandal-loving expression on her face. “Rees Pennant,” she repeated in a hissing whisper; “do you think she is in love with him?” “I am sure of it!” cried Elizabeth, with all the superiority in such matters which twenty possesses over sixteen. Lady Kate chuckled to herself with intense amusement. “Of course he isn’t in love with her,” she suggested, with a sister’s partiality. “Marion is so gawky and Rees is so handsome. It would be like a figure of Raffaele falling in love with an Anglo-Saxon saint.” “What’s the use of their falling in love, either of them?” said Elizabeth prosaically. “They can’t marry.” “Why not? He is the eldest son, and Captain Pennant’s family is as old as ours. And look at us! We’re not beauties, and I know papa does not mean to give us very handsome fortunes, or else you would have had an offer before this. You’re twenty, you know.” “Certainly. And I don’t want any offer,” answered her sister, not without a pardonable suspicion of tartness. “But I certainly shouldn’t condescend to flirt with a man beneath me in rank, and without a penny. And there must be madness in the family, or Captain Pennant would never have adopted a fisherman’s baby and brought it up as his own child.” “Deborah’s very pretty,” said Lady Kate, thoughtfully. “If we were half as good-looking we should have been photographed all over the place as beauties.”