The Ashiel Mystery | Page 4

school in Switzerland as
soon as they landed in Europe; and, while she used to fancy that at the
beginning of the holidays he was glad to see her return, she was much
more firmly convinced that at the end of them he was at least equally
pleased to see her depart.
She was nineteen before he realized that she could not be kept at school
for ever; and when he considered the situation, and saw himself, a man
scarcely over forty, saddled with a grown-up girl, who was neither his
own daughter nor that of the woman he had loved, and to whom he had
sworn to care for the child as if she were indeed his own, it must be
admitted that his heart failed him. It was not that he had any aversion to
Juliet herself. He had been fond of the child, and he liked the girl. It
was the awkwardness of his position that filled him with a kind of
despair.
"If only somebody would marry her!" he thought, as he sat opposite to
her at the dinner-table, on the night that she returned for the last time
from school.
The thought cheered him. Juliet, he noticed for the first time, had
become singularly pretty. He engaged a severe Frenchwoman of mature
age as chaperon, and made spasmodic attempts to take his adopted
daughter into such society as the Belgian port, where he was consul at
this time, could afford.
It was not a large society; nor did eligible young men figure in it in any

quantity. Those there were, were foreigners, to whom the question of a
dot must be satisfactorily solved before the idea of matrimony would so
much as occur to them.
Juliet had no money. Lady Byrne had left her fortune to her husband,
and rash speculations on his part had reduced it to a meagre amount,
which he felt no inclination to part with. Two or three years went by,
and she received no proposals. Sir Arthur's hopes of seeing her
provided for grew faint, and he could imagine no way out of his
difficulties. He himself spent his leave in England, but he never took
the girl with him on those holidays. He had no wish to be called on to
explain her presence to such of his friends as might not remember his
wife's whim; and, though she passed as his daughter abroad, she could
not do that at home.
Juliet, for her part, was not very well content. She could hardly avoid
knowing that she was looked on as an incubus, and she saw that her
father, as she called him, dreaded to be questioned as to their
relationship. She lived a simple life; rode and played tennis with young
Belgians of her own age; read, worked, went to such dances and
entertainments as were given in the little town, and did not, on the
whole, waste much time puzzling over the mystery that surrounded her
childhood. But when her friends asked her why she never went to
England with Sir Arthur, she did not know what answer to make, and
worried herself in secret about it.
Why did he not take her? Because he was ashamed of her? But why
was he ashamed? Her mother--she always thought of Lady Byrne by
that name--had said she was the daughter of a friend of hers. So that she
must at least be the child of people of good family. Was not that
enough?
She was already twenty-three when Sir Arthur married again. The lady
was an American: Mrs. Clarency Butcher, a good-looking widow of
about thirty-five, with three little girls, of whom the eldest was fifteen.
She had not the enormous wealth which is often one of her
countrywomen's most pleasing attributes, but she was moderately well
off and came of a good Colonial family. Having lived for several years

in England, she had grown to prefer the King's English to the
President's, and had dropped, almost completely, the accent of her
native country. She was extremely well educated, and talked three other
languages with equal correctness, her first husband having been
attached to various European legations. Altogether, she was a charming
and attractive woman, and there were many who envied Sir Arthur for
the second time in his life.
It was not, perhaps, her fault that she did not take very kindly to Juliet.
The girl resented the place once occupied by her dead mother being
filled by any newcomer; and was not, it is to be feared, at sufficient
pains to hide her feelings on the point. And the second Lady Byrne was
hardly to be blamed if she remembered that in a few years she would
have three daughters of her own to take out, and felt