Best ye'd ne'er see him at a'!" But the handsome shepherdess betrayed no sign of mortification or doubt.
When such prognostics were uttered, she crested her queenly head with a smile of conscious power, and looked as though--"she could, an if she would,"-- tell more about the Marquis of Arondelle, than any of these people guessed.
Meanwhile, princely Lone passed into the possession of Sir Lemuel Levison, a London banker of enormous wealth.

He had not always been Sir Lemuel Levison.

But he had once been Lord Mayor of London, and for some part that he had taken in a public demonstration or a royal pageant, (I forget which,) he had been knighted by her Majesty.
He was, at this time, a tall, spare, fair-faced, gray-haired and gray bearded man of sixty-five.

He was a widower, with "one only daughter," the youngest and sole survivor of a large family of children.
This daughter, Salome, had never known a mother's love nor a father's care.

She was under three years old when her mother passed away.
Then her father, hating his desolate home, broke up his establishment on Westbourne Terrace, London, and placed his infant daughter under the care of the nuns in the Convent of the Holy Nativity in France.
Here Salome Levison passed the days of her dreamy childhood and early youth.