Vera Nevill | Page 3

had last seen in all the raw unformed

awkwardness of early girlhood, had developed somehow into a
beautiful woman.
And there came photographs of Vera occasionally, fully confirming the
glowing accounts Princess Marinari gave of her; fantastic photographs,
portraying her in strange and different ways. There was Vera looking
out through clouds of her own dark hair hanging loosely about her face;
Vera as a Bacchante crowned with vine leaves, laughing saucily; Vera
draped as a dévote, with drooping eyes and hands crossed meekly upon
her bosom. Sometimes she would be in a ball-dress, with lace about her
white shoulders; sometimes muffled up in winter sables, her head
covered with a fur cap. But always she was beautiful, always a young
queen, even in these poor, fading photographs, that could give but a
faint idea of her loveliness to those who knew her not.
"She must be very handsome," Eustace Daintree would say heartily, as
his wife, with a little natural flush of pride, handed some picture of her
young sister across the breakfast-table to him. "How I wish we could
see her, she must be worth looking at, indeed. Mother, have you seen
this last one of Vera?"
"Beauty is a snare," the old lady would answer viciously, hardly
deigning to glance at the lovely face; "and your sister seems to me,
Marion, to be dressed up like an actress, most unlike my idea of a
modest English girl."
Then Marion would take her treasure away with her up into her own
room, out of the way of her mother-in-law's stern and repelling
remarks.
But one day there came sad news to the vicarage at Sutton. Theodora,
Princess Marinari, caught the Roman fever in its worst form, and after a
few agonizing letters and telegrams, that came so rapidly one upon the
other that she had hardly time to realize the dreadful truth, Marion
learnt that her sister was dead.
After that, the elder sister's English home became naturally the right
and fitting place for Vera to come to. So she left her gay life and her

lovers, her bright dresses and all that had hitherto seemed to her worth
living for, and came back to her father's country and took up her abode
in Eustace Daintree's quiet vicarage, where she became shortly her
sister's idol and her sister's mother-in-law's mortal foe.
And then it was that the worthy clergyman came to discover that to put
three grown-up women into the same house, and to expect them to live
together in peace and amity, is about as foolhardy an experiment as to
shut up a bulldog, a parrot, and a tom-cat in a cupboard, and expect
them to behave like so many lambs.
It is now rather more than a year since Vera Nevill came to live in her
brother-in-law's house. Let me waste no further time, but introduce her
to you at once.
The time of the year is October--the time of day is five o'clock. In the
vicarage drawing-room the afternoon tea-table has just been set out,
and the fire just lit, for it is chilly; but one of the long French windows
leading into the garden is still open, and through it Vera steps into the
room.
There is a background of brown and yellow foliage behind her, across
the garden, all aglow with the crimson light of the western sky, against
which the outlines of her figure, in its close-fitting dark dress, stand out
clearly and distinctly. Vera has the figure, not of a sylph, but of a
goddess; it is the absolute perfection of the female form. She is
tall--very tall, and she carries her head a little proudly, like a young
queen conscious of her own power.
She comes in with a certain slow and languid grace in her movements,
and pauses for an instant by the hearth, holding out her hand, that is
white and well-shaped, though perhaps a trifle too long-fingered, to the
warmth.
The glow of the newly-lit fire flickers up over her face--her face, with
its pure oval outlines, its delicate, regular features, and its dreamy eyes,
that are neither blue nor gray nor hazel, but something vague and
indistinctly beautiful, entirely peculiar to themselves. Her hair, a soft

dusky cloud, comes down low over her broad forehead, and is gathered
up at the back in some strange and thoroughly un-English fashion that
would not suit every one, yet that somehow makes a fitting crown to
the stately young head it adorns.
"Tea, Vera?" says Marion, from behind the cups and saucers.
Old Mrs. Daintree sits darning socks, severely, by the fading light.
There is a sound of distant whimpering from the shadowy corner
behind the piano; it is Tommy in disgrace. Vera turns round; Marion's
kind face looks troubled and distressed;