Lady Connie

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

AUTHOR OF “ELTHAM HOUSE,” “DELIA BLANCHFLOWER,” ETC.

 ILLUSTRATED BY ALBERT STERNER

1916

Contents

List of Illustrations

There Connie found Nora’s latest statement headed “List of Liabilities”

PART I

 

CHAPTER I

 “Well, now we’ve done all we can, and all I mean to do,” said Alice Hooper, with a pettish accent of fatigue. “Everything’s perfectly comfortable, and if she doesn’t like it, we can’t help it. I don’t know why we make such a fuss.” 

 The speaker threw herself with a gesture of fatigue into a dilapidated basket-chair that offered itself. It was a spring day, and the windows of the old schoolroom in which she and her sister were sitting were open to a back garden, untidily kept, but full of fruit-trees just coming into blossom. Through their twinkling buds and interlacing branches could be seen grey college walls—part of the famous garden front of St. Cyprian’s College, Oxford. There seemed to be a slight bluish mist over the garden and the building, a mist starred with patches of white and dazzlingly green leaf. And, above all, there was an evening sky, peaceful and luminous, from which a light wind blew towards the two girls sitting by the open window. One, the elder, had a face like a Watteau sketch, with black velvety eyes, hair drawn back from a white forehead, delicate little mouth, with sharp indentations at the corners, and a small chin. The other was much more solidly built—a girl of seventeen, in a plump phase, which however an intelligent eye would have read as 

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