HIS DARLING SIN
BY
M.E. BRADDON
Author of "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET." Etc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Copyright in the United States
of America, 1899
London
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON,
KENT & CO. Ltd.
Stationers' Hall Court
Printed for the Author by
Wm. Clowes & Sons, Ltd.
London and Beccles.
HIS DARLING SIN.
CHAPTER I.
"That small, small, imperceptible
Small talk! that cuts like powdered glass
Ground in Tophana,—who can tell
Where lurks the power the poison has?"
There is the desolation of riches as well as the desolation ofpoverty—the empty splendour of a large house in which there is nogoing and coming of family life, no sound of light footsteps andyouthful laughter—only spacious rooms and fine furniture, and onesolitary figure moving silently amidst the vacant grandeur. This senseof desolation, of a melancholy silence and emptiness, came upon LadyPerivale on her return to the mansion in Grosvenor Square, which wasamong the numerous good things of this world that had fallen into herlap, seven years ago, when she made one of the best matches of theseason.
She had not sold herself to an unloved suitor. She had been sincerelyattached to Sir Hector Perivale, and had sincerely mourned him when,after two years of domestic happiness, he died suddenly, in the primeof life, from the consequences of a chill caught on his grouse moor inArgyleshire, where he and his young wife, and a few chosen pals, madelife a perpetual picnic, and knew no enemy but foul weather.
This time the enemy was Death. A neglected cold turned to pneumonia,and Grace Perivale was a widow.
"It does seem hard lines," whispered Hector, when he knew that he wasdoomed. "We have had such a good time, Grace; and it's rough on me toleave you."
No child had been born of that happy union, and Grace found herselfalone in the world at one and twenty, in full possession of herhusband's fortune, which was princely, even according to the modernstandard by which incomes are measured—a fortune lying chieflyunderground, in Durham coalfields, secure from change as the earthitself, and only subject to temporary diminution from strikes,or bad times. She needed a steady brain to deal with such largeresponsibilities, for she had not been born or reared among theaffluent classes. In her father's East Anglian Rectory the mainphilosophy of life had been to do without things.
Her husband had none but distant relations, whom he had kept at adistance; so there were no interfering brothers or sisters, no pryingaunts or officious uncles to worry her with good advice. She stoodalone, with a castle on the Scottish border, round whose turrets theseamews wheeled, and at whose base the German Ocean rolled in menacinggrandeur, one of the finest houses in Grosvenor Square, and an incomethat was described by her friends and the gossiping Press at anythingyou like between twenty and fifty thousand a year.
So rich, so much alone, Lady Perivale was naturally capricious. Oneof her caprices was to hate her castle in Northumberland, and to lovea hill-side villa on the Italian Riviera, two or three miles from asmall seaport, little known to travellers, save as a ragged line ofdilapidated white houses straggling along the sea front, past which