" Himes faced his stepdaughter angrily.

He pictured the third Mrs. Cartaret as a woman of affectionate gaiety and a pleasing worldliness, so well surrounded by adorers of his own sex that she could probably furnish forth her three stepdaughters from the numbers of those she had no use for.

The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman of fashion, left her stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses, while 'Citizen Stanhope' ruled the household from his laboratory with the violence of a tyrant.

Mrs. Jerry did not accompany them; she wanted to be seen with her trying stepdaughter as little as possible, and Tommy's had been the happy proposal that he should attend them alternately"fling away my own figure to save yours," he had said gallantly to Mrs. Jerry.

Again the stepmother took her daughter and went to the castle to visit her stepdaughter, who in spite of all treated her as her mother and invited her into the castle garden.