Savoir-Faire

Lady Trent's Daughter — By Isabel Clarke

Chapter One. ‘Miss Ardern had just laid aside her knitting because it was getting too dark to see comfortably…. The evening had followed upon a perfectly lovely day in early June. The morning had begun with a thick white mist…. And afterwards, when the sun had finally triumphed, there had supervened a golden day with just a hint of crispness in the air at first, but with sunshine that blazed prodigally for nearly a dozen hours…. And now the day was done.’

These observations, which occur on page I, set us dreaming. Just supposing that between two and three page 253 the sky had become overcast, and it had looked very much like a shower, or, before luncheon, a nasty little wind had sprung up. How would the sympathetic reader have received such intelligence? Would his jaw have dropped? Would he have shaded his eyes with his hand a moment, murmuring, ‘This climate—this climate!’ Is this first page, in fact, a perfectly devilish piece of insight on the part of Miss Isabel Clarke, or, as this is her thirteenth novel, the result of long practice upon the human heart? Here we are, you see, introduced to Miss Ardern before we know it—the wretched business of presentation got over in the dusk, with her laying aside her knitting at the end of a perfect day. A perfect day—how softly it launches us, how easily we glide away on it! There had been that tiny moment of doubt, when the mist was so thick, just to urge our curiosity, but the instant dispelling of it captured our confidence. And pray do not overlook the delightfully—one might almost say cosy relationship that is established between us by ‘the evening had followed upon a perfectly lovely day … there had been just a hint of crispness.’ And underlying all this there is the dark, wicked certainty, the pungent relish to the mild dish, that this sort of thing is a great deal too good to last, and would not be mentioned, indeed, if the worst were not going to happen….

What does happen is that Miss Ardern's niece, who is fatherless, and whom she has brought up from babyhood, falls in love with a young man who is already engaged to her absentee mother. This, when the mother arrives on the scene, is, needless to say, very awkward, and might well have ended in catastrophe had not the happy ending intervened to unclasp the wrong hands and join for happy ever the right ones.