Saint Ann's

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE PRETTY AND VIRTUOUS ONE. It was the universal opinion of the late Mr. Meynell's friends that he did a risky and uncalled-for thing when, at the somewhat advanced age of sixty, he saw fit to marry, as his second wife, that very fashionable and fast young woman Lady Margaret Orme; and in this opinion his only son Victor fully concurred. Victor, however, was not consulted in the matter; and as Mr. Meynell died before the following year was out, he had not, perhaps, time to repent of his bargain. His will was considered a rather unfair one; for he bequeathed 15,000 to his son and everything else that he possessed to his widow, forgetting, it must be assumed, to make any provision at all for his infant daughter Rhoda, whose existence, indeed, began only a very few months before his own terminated. He had been a well-to-do, but scarcely a rich man; yet for sixteen years after his death Lady Margaret lived like a rich woman; and so, on her demise, which occurred unexpectedly, as the result of a chill contracted in a London ball-room, her executors found that the task of administering her estate would not be a heavy one. Of the fortune which she had inherited from her husband next to nothing remained; she had been gaily living upon her principal, and upon whatshe would have continued to live after its exhaustion might have been an awkward question, had she not solved it by quitting this expensive planet in the nick of time. So far as Lady Margaret herself was concerned, the above solution was, of course, final and satisfactory; but what, the executors asked, with outspread hands and uplifted brows, was to become of Miss Meynell? Who was going to take charge of a girl of seventeen, brought up with extravagant tastes, ready to be introduced into society, to all i...