Marie glanced at herself in the glass. She was tall and slim for her age, which was not quite seventeen, and as she was entirely free from conceit she could see no beauty in her pale face and dark eyes, which, together with her name of Marie Celeste, she had inherited from her French mother. 

"Am I like mother, Auntie Madge?" she asked, and Miss Chester smiled as she answered: 

"You have your mother's eyes." 

Marie looked at her reflection again. 

"Mother was very pretty, wasn't she?" she asked, and Miss Chester said: "Yes—she was, very pretty." 

Marie sighed. "Of course, I can't be like her, then," she said, resignedly, and turned away. 

Presently: "Is Chris coming these holidays?" she asked. 

Miss Chester shook her head. 

4 "He did not think so. He wrote that he should go to Scotland with the Knights." 

4

Marie flushed. "I hate the Knights," she said pettishly. She had never seen them, but on principle she hated everyone and everything who took Christopher from her. 

The following year she was sent to a finishing school in Paris, and while she was there her father died suddenly. 

A wire came from England late one night and Marie was packed off home the following morning. 

Her father's death was no great grief to her, though in a placid sort of way she had been fond of him. She had written to him regularly every Sunday, and was grateful for all that she knew he had done for her, but any deep love she might have borne for him had long ago gone to Chris. He was the beginning and end of her girlish dreams—the center of her whole life. 

As she sat in the stuffy cabin on the cross-Channel boat and listened to the waves outside her chief thought was, should she see Chris? Had they wired for him to come home from wherever he was? 

He had left Cambridge now, she knew, but what he was doing or how he spent his time she did not know. All the way up in the train from Dover she was thinking of him, 

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