ABSTRACT
Not many days after Bill Dawkins’ death Harry Lancaster arrived in England. His home-coming was a great joy to his mother and sister, who lived at Upton, in a tiny house belonging to Lord Clevedon, about a mile from the home where they had passed their prosperous days before Mr. Lancaster’s death. Mrs. Dixie – who had married a second time, and lost her second husband almost immediately afterwards, – had a bland expansiveness about her manner which referred directly to her former glories, just as her old lace and miniatures, and sundry valuable pieces of plate, made eloquent allusion to that past which threw so much effulgence upon her and her only daughter, Adrienne. Adrienne, however, was a cultivated, keen-witted young woman, dainty in ideas as in her person, and she made her allusions to the past with delicacy, and indeed very seldom made them at all. She did not follow her mother’s example of wearing unremittingly at her throat, a gigantic ancestor, 84 with pink cheeks and a light blue coat. Harry used to say of Mrs. Dixie that she was like a gorgeous sunset after a hot midsummer day; the sun and its glories had gone down, but the glow still remained.
