The Lost Lady of Lone | Page 9

even if she--even if she--Oh, dear! what a fool I am! I had better never have come out of the convent. I will think no more about him," said Salome, resolutely taking up a volume of the "Lives of the Saints," and turning to the page that related how--
"St. Rosalie, Darling of each heart and eye, From all the youth of Italy Retired to God."
"That is the noblest love and service, after all," she said--"the noblest, surely, because it is Divine!"
And she resolved to emulate the example of the young and beautiful Italian virgin. She, too, would retire to God. That is, she would enter her convent as soon as her three probationary years should be passed.
But though she so resolved to devote herself to Heaven in this abnormal way, the natural human love that now glowed in her heart, would not be put down by an unnatural resolve.
Days and nights passed, and she still thought of the banished heir all day, and dreamed of him all night--the more intensely as well as purely perhaps, because she had never looked upon his living face.
To her he was an abstract ideal.
Later in the month her father returned to Lone--on business of more importance than that which had hurried him away.
He had only retired from one phase of public life to enter upon another.
There was to be a new Parliament. And at the solicitations of many interested parties, and perhaps also at the promptings of his own late ambition, Sir Lemuel Levison consented to stand for the borough of Lone. In the absence of the young Marquis of Arondelle there was no one to oppose him, and he was returned by an almost unanimous vote.
Early in February, Sir Lemuel Levison took his dreaming daughter and went up to London to take his seat in the House of Commons at the meeting of Parliament.
He engaged a sumptuously furnished house on Westbourne Terrace, and invited a distant relative, Lady Belgrave, the childless widow of a baronet, to come and pass the season with him and chaperone his daughter on her entrance into society.
Lady Belgrade was sixty years old, tall, stout, fair-complexioned, gray-haired, healthy, good-humored, and well-dressed--altogether as commonplace and harmless a fine lady as could be found in the fashionable world.
Salome had never seen her, scarcely ever heard of her before the day of her arrival at Westbourne Terrace.
Salome met Lady Belgrade with courtesy and kindness, but with much indifference.
Lady Belgrade, on her part, met her young kinswoman with critical curiosity.
"She is not pretty, not at all pretty, and one does not like to have a plain girl to bring out. She is not pretty, and what is worse than all, she seems to know it. And she can only grow pretty by believing that she is so. A girl with such a pair of eyes as hers can always get the reputation of beauty if she can only be made to believe in herself," was Lady Belgrade's secret comment; but--
"What beautiful eyes you have, my dear!" she said with effusion, as she kissed Salome on both cheeks.
The girl smiled and blushed with pleasure, for this was the first time in all her life that she had been credited with any beauty at all.
Lady Belgrade was partly right and partly wrong.
A girl with such a physique as Salome could never be pretty, never be handsome, but, with such a soul as hers, might grow beautiful.
At her Majesty's first drawing-room, Salome Levison was presented at court, where she attracted the attention, only as the daughter of Sir Lemuel Levison, the new Radical member for Lone, and as the sole heiress of the great banker's almost fabulous wealth.
Then under the experienced guidance of Lady Belgrade, she was launched into fashionable society. And society received the young expectant of enormous wealth, as society always does, with excessive adulation.
Salome was admired, followed, flattered, feted, as though she had been a beauty as well as an heiress. She was petted at home and worshiped abroad. Her father gave unlimited pocket-money in form of bank-cheques, to be filled up at her own discretion. For she was his only daughter, and he wished to get her in love with the world and out of conceit of a convent. And surely the run of his bank, and of all the fine shops of London, would do that, he thought, if anything could.
But Salome remained a "sealed book" to the wealthy banker, and a great trial to the fashionable chaperon who had her in training. Salome would not grow pretty, in spite of all that could be done for her. Salome would not make a sensation, for all her father's wealth and her own expectations. She remained quiet, shy, silent, dreamy, even in the gayest society, as in the Highland solitudes, with one