If Georgina Champernowne had secured for herself a certain position in the fashionable world, she had secured it entirely without effort. She had pleased others by pleasing herself. During her husband's lifetime she had been buried alive in a gloomy old Northumbrian castle that rose black and bare above a great expanse of hill and dale, sparsely wooded here and there, and dignified with the name of park. Those who knew most about her--and even they seemed to know very little--declared that the elegant Georgina had known the bitter gripe of poverty's stern hand before she married Mohun Champernowne, of Champernowne Castle. Her father, Ambrose Arscott Pomeroy, was the last representative of a grand old Cornish family, and had carried his three sons and five daughters to a sleepy Belgian town, where the grass grew in the deserted highways, and where the halls in which mediæval commerce had displayed her richest treasures amidst clamorous crowds of buyers and sellers, served for the storehouses of petty manufacturers or the habitations of lonely old women. Georgina had been educated in a convent within a few miles of Brussels, at a cost of about forty pounds a year, and had emerged therefrom more accomplished than one out of twenty of the damsels who leave a fashionable finishing-school, where the annual stipend is something over three hundred. An accidental meeting between Ambrose Pomeroy and his old friend Mohun Champernowne had brought about the marriage of Georgina; and after performing the duties of a devoted wife, and enduring the humours of an invalid husband and the unspeakable dulness of a Northumbrian mansion for ten years, Mr. Pomeroy's daughter found herself mistress alike of her own destiny and of every shilling that her husband had to leave. Her father had died within the last few years; her brothers and sisters had scattered far and wide, some doing badly, some doing well, but none of them holding their own in the sphere to which Mohun Champernowne's widow belonged. She was quite alone in the world. There was no one who had any right to question her actions or interfere with her caprices. She was thirty-two years of age, and in the dull period of her seclusion her taste had refined itself, and her intellect had ripened.