“Make yourself at home, mon prince,” she murmured with a softer light in her brilliant eyes—“and good-night—a sweet good-night,” she added tenderly, throwing a mute kiss with both hands in the direction of the invisible smoker. “The woman who loves you will keep watch over you, aroon.”
CHAPTER II.
MISS Gwendoline Beattison, the lady who with her companion, an elderly Frenchwoman, occupied the adjoining compartment, was the daughter of General Beattison and of his wife, a Spanish lady of renowned beauty.
After acquiring great wealth in India, General Beattison—a Scotchman by birth—had returned to his native town, and there during the intervals of her visiting and education abroad his daughter had resided, and had made the acquaintance of Richard Dalrymple, the only son of Doctor Dalrymple, senior physician of the town.
When the younger Dalrymple had established a medical practice in the West-end of London it seemed only natural that the Beattisons, who generally spent from five to six months in the Metropolis each year, should patronize him, more especially as they knew him to be well trained in his profession, and well thought of among his brother practitioners.
Dalrymple was an attractive man, a good talker and possessed of a magnetism which drew other men to him. He was popular and was accordingly in demand and at no house was he more welcome than at the home of General Beattison.
But complications soon arose.
Mrs. Beattison had died while her daughter Gwendoline, an only child, was still in the nursery, and the latter’s education had largely devolved upon governesses at home and abroad, whom her naturally dominant will soon reduced to subjection.
The result was that by the time she was sixteen years of age, Miss Beattison was a law unto herself, and it might be added with some show of truth, to her father also.
She was now twenty-one years of age and all the talk of “London-town,” in her matchless beauty—the despair alike of painters and poets. From her mother she had inherited her black Castilian hair and glorious dark eyes, together with that magnetism of glance and capacity for arousing or manifesting passion which seems the heritage of Spain’s seductive daughters.