"And you have come to anchor here with Mrs. L'Estrange, who is your cousin, one of the few relatives who did not visit the sins of the fathers on the children."
Her voice was a little scornful. "The cousinship is a very distant one. And, as she is an inveterate gambler herself, but more lucky than my father, she could hardly look upon gambling in another as a deadly sin." He nodded his head in agreement. He did not want to talk himself, for fear he should interrupt the flow of her reminiscences; she was evidently in a confidential mood this afternoon.
"I saw her a few times when quite a child, and then she vanished like the others. A couple of years ago, we met in Devonshire at the house of a mutual acquaintance. She seemed to take a fancy to me. In the end, she proposed that I should, for the present, make my home with her. She has only one interest in life, play. She is a very lazy woman. She hates writing the briefest note, and housekeeping is abhorrent to her. I attend to her correspondence, I order the dinner and look after the servants. I am not exactly eating the bread of charity," she concluded with a little mirthless laugh, "because I give some work in exchange for my food. My own little pittance provides me with clothes."
He wondered what the little pittance represented in annual hard cash. She was dressed quietly but in good taste, and he was judge enough of woman's apparel to know that the material of her dress was expensive. On her slender fingers glittered a few valuable rings, heirlooms probably saved from the clutches of the gambling father. She did not convey the impression of poverty, but perhaps she was clever, and knew how to make the best of a small income.
There was a long silence, and it almost seemed as if she had forgotten his presence. For she sat with a musing look in her beautiful eyes, her thoughts evidently in the past, conjuring up Heaven knows how many painful memories.
Then she came back to herself, and turned to him with an apologetic smile. "I am afraid I have bored you to tears with my stupid personal history, but I will finish by telling you one little thing that may amuse you."
He protested, of course, that he had not been in the least bored, only too painfully interested.
"Well, I am not a person easily crushed, and although a physical coward and frightened of raids and thunderstorms, I am not a moral one. When I began to review my position, I tried to hit upon some way of making money."
Was she fond of money, he wondered? Well, perhaps, like most women, she wanted money to buy herself pretty things. There was nothing unusual in that.
"When I was a schoolgirl, I was supposed to show some artistic talent; I got several prizes. So I set to work and painted some half-a-dozen small things, in what I conceived to be a popular style, and took them round to as many dealers. In a week my hopes were shattered. One straightforward creature told me frankly that they just attained the school-girl level of excellence, but that I should never become an artist. It was not in me."