"Yes--in Bruton Street."

"Right--that's an appointment," Rodwell exclaimed cheerily; and then, after bending low over Lady Betty's thin white hand, he left.

CHAPTER TWO.

THE SUSPICIONS OF ELISE.

At nine o'clock that same evening, in a well-furnished drawing-room half-way up Fitzjohn's Avenue, in Hampstead, a pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired girl of twenty-one sat at the piano alone, playing a gay French chanson, to pass away the time.

Dressed in a dainty little dinner-gown of carnation pink, and wearing in her well-dressed hair a touch of velvet to match, she presented a pretty picture beneath the shaded electric-light which fell over the instrument set in a corner.

Her mother, Mrs Shearman, a charming, grey-haired lady, had just gone out, while her father, Daniel Shearman, a rich tool-manufacturer, whose works were outside Birmingham, was away at the factory, as was his habit three days each week.

Elise Shearman was just a typical athletic English girl.  In her early youth her parents were "making their way in the world," but at fourteen she had been sent abroad to school, first to Lausanne, and afterwards to Dresden, where she had studied music, as so many English girls have done.

On her return to Hampstead, whither her father had removed from the grime and toil of work-a-day Birmingham, she found her home very dull. Because the Shearmans were manufacturers, the snobbishness of Hampstead, with its "first Thursdays," would have nothing to do with them; though, if the truth were told, Dan Shearman could have bought up most of his neighbours in Fitzjohn's Avenue, and was a sterling good Englishman into the bargain--which could not be said of some of those slippery, smooth-tongued City adventurers who resided behind the iron railings of that select thoroughfare.

Running her slim white hands over the keys, she began the gay refrain of one of the chansonettes which she had learned in Paris--one of the gay songs of the boulevards, which was, perhaps, not very apropos for young ladies, but which she often sang because of its gay, blithe air-- Belloche's "L'Eventail Parisien."

In her sweet, musical treble she sang gaily--  Des qu'arrivent les grand's chaleurs,
  A la terrass' des brasseries
  Les eventails de tout's couleurs
  Viennent bercer nos reveries.
  Car, 

 Prev. P 8/134 next