"Ima, you do look at me an awful lot," Percival told her in the early days, catching her large eyes fixed upon him. "Well, thou art not like other boys I see," she told him; and a little while after she asked him, "Dost thou know little ladies with white skins like thine, little master?" "I'm brown!" said Percival indignantly. She shook her head. "But little ladies?" "I know one," said Percival. "White! Well, you'd stare if you saw her, Ima. Snow-White-and-Rose-Red, I call her," and in his tone was something akin to the mingled admiration and awe with which small schoolboys speak of their cricket captain. She was silent for a moment; then, "Well, tell me, little master," she said. It was of Dora that he told her. When Lady Burdon had returned that call paid on her by Mrs. Espart from Abbey Royal she had been as greatly captivated by Dora as she had been taken by Dora's mother. She found in Mrs. Espart a curiously cold and high-bred air that appealed to her--being a quality she was at pains to cultivate in herself--and appealed the more in that it very graciously unbent towards her. Its unbending was explainable by the quality that, for her own part, she presented to Mrs. Espart--that of her rank and station. Mrs. Espart had been married in her teens, brought from school for the purpose, by a mother whose whole conception of duty in regard to her daughters was wealthy marriage, and who had fastened upon it in this case in the person of Mr. Espart--a nice little man, an indifferently bred little man, but a most obviously well-possessed little man. The girl was hurriedly fetched from her finishing school, whirled through a headachy fortnight of corseting and costuming, and put in Mr. Espart's way and then in his possession with the docility of one educated from childhood for such a purpose. Used as a woman who never had realised there was a life beyond the cloisters bounded by lessons in deportment, in the nice languages and the nice arts; as a wife who never yet had been a child but always a young lady, Mrs. Espart discovered that she was mated with a vulgarian, Mr. Espart that he had married, as he expressed it, "a frozen statue." She thought of him and despised him as the one; he thought of her, feared her, and adored her as the other. The chill she struck into his mind communicated itself in some way to his bones, and very shortly after he had bought Abbey Royal--her command being that he should nurse the local political interests, enrich the Party from his coffers and so win her the social status her sisters had--he began to shrivel and incontinently died--frozen.