The time of this story is post-Johnsonian, but it is older than its readers; unless, indeed, a chance oldster now and then opens it to see if it is a proper book to have in the house. The world in the early fifties was very unlike what it is in the present century, and _that_ isn't yet in its teens. It was also very unlike what it had been in the days when the family mansion in Cavendish Square, that had not had a family in it then for forty years, was as good as new. It was so, no doubt, for a good while after George the Third ceased to be King, because the thorough griming it has had since had hardly begun, and fields were sweet at Paddington, and the Regent could be bacchanalian in that big drawing-room on the first floor without any consciousness that he had a Park in the neighbourhood. Oh dear--how near the country Cavendish Square was in those days! By the time Queen Victoria was on the throne the grime had set in in earnest, and was hard at work long before the fifty-one Exhibition reported progress--progress in bedevilment, says the Pessimist? Never mind him! Let him sulk in a corner while the Optimist dwells on the marvellous developments of which fifty-one was only symptomatic--the quick-firing guns and smokeless powder; the mighty ships, a dozen of them big enough to take all the Athenians of the days of Pericles to the bottom at once; the machines that turn out books so cheap that their contents may be forgotten in six months, and no one be a penny the worse; the millionaires who have so much money they can't spend it--heaps and heaps of wonders up-to-date that no one ever feels surprised at nowadays. The Optimist will tell you all about them. For the moment, let's pretend that none of them have come to pass, and get back to Cavendish Square at the date of the story, and the suite of rooms on the second floor that had been Sister Nora's town anchorage when she first made Dave Wardle's acquaintance as an unconscious Hospital patient, and that had been renovated since her father's death to serve as a _pied-a-terre_ until she could be sure of her arrangements in the days to come. Her friends were not the least too tired, thank you, after the journey, to be shown the great drawing-room, on which the touching incident in the life of a Royal Personage had conferred an historical dignity. "I think--" said she "--only I haven't quite made up my mind yet--that I shall call this ward Mrs. Fitzherbert, and the next room Princess Caroline. Or the other way round. Which do you think?" For one of her schemes was to turn the old family mansion into a Hospital. "Let me see!" said Gwen. "I've forgotten my history. Mrs. Fitzherbert was his wife, wasn't she?" Miss Dickenson was always to be relied on for general information. "Unquestionably," said she. "But he repudiated her for political reasons, a course open to him as heir to the throne. Legally, Princess Caroline of Brunswick was his lawful wife...."