Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and she shuddered unmistakably at the thought. As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior, merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread--that of competitors in the same field--might be warded off indefinitely, or, better still, never experienced between them. She did not yet fear Baby. The disparity in their ages seemed too great and too obvious for that: but in recollecting certain incidents in their childhood, and one or two things about Baby's appearance and behaviour during the last two years, Cleopatra could not entirely free herself from a perfectly definite feeling of vexation in regard to her sister. Baby had not troubled her at all as an infant. It was as a child of eight, when Cleopatra was just sixteen, that her sister had first revealed disquieting proclivities. She had, for instance, a command of blandishments which to her elder were a closed book. By means of wiles and cajoleries utterly inimitable, she could extract money and presents from adults from whom the haughty Cleopatra would not even have solicited a kiss. In five years Baby had received more boxes of chocolates and more dolls than her sister had received during her whole lifetime. This was not, however, because the younger child was in any respect more beautiful than the elder, but rather owing to the younger's extraordinary gift for securing what she wanted by any means that might come to hand. For a long while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen, Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during this period. Then, all of a sudden--and the day was written indelibly on the elder girl's memory--on a certain spring morning, at the time of year when winter frocks are doffed for lighter and brighter confections, Cleopatra beheld a vision, the nature of which was such as in a trice to resuscitate all those anxieties about her junior which, to do her justice, she had long ago relegated to oblivion.