People seemed to be always wanting me as one, and then reluctantly abandoning me!

“Your kindness and sympathy have helped me a lot,” said I.

“They won’t pay your way.”

“I have no way.  So far as I can see, I shall have to stop in Cannes, anonymously so to speak, for the rest of my life.”

“Where would you like to go, if you could choose—­since you can’t go to your relations?”

Again my thoughts travelled after Miss Paget, as if she had been a fat, red will-o’-the-wisp.

“To England, perhaps,” I answered.  “In a few weeks from now I might be able to find a position there.”  And I went on to tell, in as few words as possible, my adventure in the railway train.

“H’m!” said Lady Kilmarny.  “We’ll look her up in Who’s Who, and see if she exists.  If she’s anybody, she’ll be there.  And Who’s Who I always have with me, abroad.  One meets so many pretenders, it’s quite dangerous.”

“How can you tell I’m not one?” I asked.  “Yet you spoke to me.”

“Why, you’re down in a kind of invisible book, called ‘You’re You.’  It’s sufficient reference for me.  Besides, if your two eyes couldn’t be trusted, it would be easy to shed you.”

Lady Kilmarny said this smilingly, as she found the red book, and passed her finger down the columns of P’s.

“Yes, here’s the name, and the two addresses on the visiting-card.  She’s the Honourable Maria Paget, only daughter of the late Baron Northfield.  Yes, an engagement with her would be safe, if not agreeable.  But how to get you to England?”

“Perhaps I could go as somebody’s maid,” I reflected aloud.

She looked at me sharply. "Would you do that?”

“It would be better than being an advertisement for Corn Plasters,” I smiled.

“Then,” said Lady Kilmarny, “perhaps, after all, I can help you.  But no—­I should never dare to suggest it!  The thought of a girl like you—­it would be too dreadful.”

CHAPTER IV

When my father had been extravagant, he used to say gaily in self-defence that “one owed something to one’s ancestors.”  Certainly, if it had not been for several of his ancestors, he would not have owed so much to his contemporaries.  But in spite of their agreeable vices, or because of them, I was brought up in the cult of ancestor worship, as religiously as if I had been Chinese.

To be a d’Angely was a privilege, in our eyes, which not only supplied gilding for the gingerbread, but for the most economical substitutes.

   “Ne roi je suis,
    Ne prince aussi,
    Je suis le Sire d’Angely,”

calmly remarked the gentleman of Louis XI.’s time, who became famous for hanging as many retainers as he liked, and defending his action by originating the family motto.

Mother also had ancestors who began to take themselves seriously somewhere about the time of the Mayflower, though for all we know they may have secured their passage in the steerage.