Alice turned slowly in front of the looking glass and stared at her reflection with resignation. “If you say so,” she rejoined in a dead voice. Privately Alice thought the lemon-colored sarsenet dress trimmed with a vast quantity of artificial roses and white lace drapery and fastened down the front with topaz snaps, too fussy and aging. Her once glossy black hair was teased and frizzled into a top-heavy style. But, as in all other things, she knew that her companion, Miss Snapper, would have the last word.

Alice was preparing to depart for the opening ball of the London Season, to be held at the Duchess of Courtland’s town house in Gloucester Square. For Alice, Comtesse de la Valle-Chenevix was accepted everywhere. The redoubtable Miss Snapper had seen to that.

Alice had hardly seen the Duke in the last seven days before he had disappeared for good. He had arranged the rental of a pretty house in Manchester Square, banked a great deal of money for her, arranged a man of business for her, servants were hired, furnishings bought and, finally, the formidable Miss Snapper hired as companion.

Miss Snapper was of the untitled aristocracy and came from an impoverished Surrey family which the Duke had known in their palmy days of the last century, and had felt obliged to supply a home to this last relic of the family. That she knew everyone and was acceptable everywhere, was beyond question. The Duke had in his whirlwind of activity failed to notice that she was too intense and managing a spinster to be companion to such a young and such a green girl.

To Alice, it seemed as if she were never allowed to be alone with him. Miss Snapper was always present. She was a thin, angular woman in her thirties with a bony chest, snapping black eyes, a thin mouth which covered a row of sharp little teeth, dusty red hair and a conversational style which consisted of a series of denouncements.

She adored the Duke with an almost embarrassing passion of which he was quite oblivious, and any time Alice shyly tried to hint that she might like to be alone with her uncle, Miss Snapper would bare her sharp little teeth and simper, “Why, Alice dear. You are so quiet, I declare I cannot hear a word you say. Now you must run along and leave us old people to discuss your future.”

And so, Alice’s timid and awkward farewell to her “uncle” was made under the avid stare of Miss Snapper. For nights, she had cried to him with all her mind to come back but as the shadows lengthened, no shimmering figure came through the wall, no light mocking drawl came to her ears, and her eyes grew dull and heavy with nights of crying.