My mother has old-fashioned ideas, and I would hate to pain the poor dear lady." It took nearly two years, but the divorce was completed at last, and Cecilia Cricklander found herself perfectly free and with all the keen scent of the hunter for the chase dilating her fine nostrils as she stood upon the deck of the great ocean liner bound for Liverpool.
She was a very beautiful woman and refined in every point, with exquisite feet and hands, pure, brilliant, fair coloring and a superb figure, and even a fairly sweet voice.

Her education had been a good deal neglected because she was too spoilt by a doting father to profit by the instruction he provided for her.

She felt this keenly directly she began to go out into the world, and immediately commenced to remedy the defect.

For her, from the very beginning, life appeared in the light of a game.

Fate was an adversary from whom she meant to win all the stakes, and it behooved a clever woman not to overlook a single card that might be of use to her in her play.