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CHAPTER III.

I DON’T think I can manage this garden-party to-day, Clare. You will let me off, won’t you? I really don’t feel up to it, and it is so hot!

“Why, my dear child, are you not well? I wonder what you had better take?”

Alice was lying on a comfortable chintz-coloured many-cushioned sofa, in a stage attitude of complete prostration, her hands clasped above her head—vide photograph of Sarah Bernhardt—and her eyes closed, either from extreme exhaustion or from a deceitful desire to avoid examination.

Clare stood beside her in unwonted magnificence of black lace, and a pink bonnet which had borne the burden and heat of the day during most of the last London season.

As a general rule Clare did not permit anyone in the house except herself to have a headache. There are very few sovereigns who can bear to

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