by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

“ You must stave off the smash, That's your business. Then Elizabeth will marry a title with money or an American millionaire or some one, and prevent it from ever coming.”
This thrilled me, and I felt like a Joan of Arc out to save her family, not by capturing a foe, but a husband.
Mr. Carstairs did stave off the smash, Heaven or its opposite alone knows how; and grandmother spent about half a future millionaire husband's possible income in taking a town house with a train of servants, renting a Rolls-Royce, and buying for us both the most divine clothes imaginable. ”

“ The ghost of a “nice English young lady” was preferable in her opinion to a military spy in the flesh! I agreed, but I was not keen on seeing either. My nerves were jumpy. Consequently I lay awake, hour after hour, though Shelagh was in grandmother's room, adjoining mine, with the door open between.
When I did sleep I must have slept heavily. I dreamed that I was a prisoner on a submarine and that signals from Courtenaye Abbey flashed straight into my face. ”

“ I felt suddenly rather curious about the person struck by a “double blow,” for a “fellow feeling makes one wondrous kind;” and at that moment I was a sort of modern, female Damocles myself. In fact, I had got the Marchese d'Ardini to bring me away from the ballroom to hide in this secret arbor of his old Roman garden because my mood was out of tune for dancing. I hadn't wanted to come, but grandmother had insisted. ”

“ Shelagh and I knew nothing until Barl came pounding at my door. Then the stinging of our nostrils and eyelids was a fire alarm!
It's wonderful how quickly you can do things when you have to! Ten minutes later I was running as fast as I could go to the village, and might have earned a prize for a two-mile sprint if I hadn't raced alone. By the time the fire engines reached the Abbey, it was too late to save a whole side of the glorious old “linen fold” paneling of the hall. ”

“ All I thought of was my intense desire to hear what those two would say next.
“Like grandmother, like granddaughter, I suppose,” went on the ex-cowboy baronet, James Courtenaye. “A hard-hearted lot, my only surviving female relatives seem to be! Her husband at the front liable to die at any minute, her grandmother dying at home, and our fair young princess dancing at a ball.” ”

“ CHAPTER I. IWONDER who will tell her,” I heard somebody say, just outside the arbor.
The somebody was a woman, and the somebody else who answered was a man,
“Glad it won't be me,” he replied ungrammatically.
I didn't know who these somebodies were, and I didn't much care. For the first instant, the one thing I did care about was that they should remain outside the arbor, to which I had retreated, instead of finding their way in. Then the next words waked my interest. They sounded mysterious, and I loved mysteries—then. ”

“ Carstairs decided to see grandmother in person.
It was when she received his telegram that she decided I must accept Prince Miramare. She had wanted an Englishman for me; but a prince is a prince; and though Paolo was far from rich at the moment, he had the prospect of an immediate million——lire, alas, not pounds. An enormously rich Greek offered him that sum for the fourteenth-century Castello di Miramare on a mountain all its own, some miles from Rome. ”

“ The principal things I know how to do are to look pretty and to be nice to people, so that when people are with me they feel purry and pleasant. With this stock in trade I had a perfectly gorgeous time in life until Fate stuck a finger into my mechanism and upset the working of my pendulum. ”

“ Grandmother is dead. And—Paolo?”
“His plane crashed. It was instant death—not painful. Alas, the telegram came to your hotel, and the signora, your grandmother, opened it. Her maid found it in her hand. The brave spirit had fled! Mr. Carstairs, her solicitor, and his kind American wife came here at once. How fortunate was the business which brought him to Rome just now, looking after your interest! A search party was after me, while I was seeking a mere ice! And now the Carstairs wait to take you to your hotel. ”

“ From time to time she replenished the household equipment from supplies which were on hand at the Abbey. Grandmother wasn't a woman to be conquered by shortages! On one occasion she remembered a hundred yards of bargain stuff she'd bought to be used for new dust covers at the Abbey, and as all the servants but two were discharged when we left for town, the sheets had never been made up. ”

“ Unless somebody takes that trouble off its hands, it stays stopped. Whereas, if a girl or a young, able-bodied woman runs down—that is, comes suddenly to the end of everything, including resources—she mayn't give up ticking for a single second. ”