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whoever could find the price for them; the gardeners were dismissed. The flowers which had given her mother so much joy were choked with weeds.
    Slowly too the more valuable things in the house disappeared. First a pair of Queen Anne mirrors which had once hung in her mother’s home were taken away to be repaired and were never returned.
    Then the family portraits were sent to London to an Auction. “You had no right to sell those,” Lalitha had challenged her Step-mother. “They belong to the family. As Papa had no son, I would wish my son to have them.”
    “Are you so sure you will have one?” Lady Studley sneered. “Do you imagine anyone would marry you? Or that I could dispense with your valuable services?”
    She spoke sarcastically; for by this time Lalitha had become nothing more nor less than an unpaid servant.
    She thought with a little throb of horror that this might be her position for the rest of her life.
    Sophie was eighteen the previous Summer and Lalitha was surprised that Lady Studley had made no attempt to take her to London or to entertain for her.
    By now she was overwhelmingly beautiful and Lalitha thought, in all sincerity, that it would be impossible for any other girl to be as lovely.
    It was after Christmas when she realised why there had been a delay.
    “Sophie is seventeen and a half,” Lady Studley said in January.
    Lalitha looked at her in surprise, knowing full well that Sophie was eighteen.
    But by now she had learnt not to contradict, nor to argue, unless she wished to be beaten violently for her impertinence. “She was born,” Lady Studley continued, “on the third day of May, on which day we will celebrate her birth-day.”
    “But that is my birth-day!” Lalitha exclaimed. “I shall be eighteen on the third of May.”
    “You have made a mistake,” Lady Studley replied. “You were eighteen last year on the tenth of July.” “No! That was Sophie’s birthday!” Lalitha said in bewilderment.
    “Are you really prepared to argue with me?” Lady Studley asked.
    There was an expression on her face which made Lalitha recoil from her.
    “No ... no,” she said in a frightened tone.
    “Sophie is my child and your father’s,” Lady Studley went on quietly. “She was born ten months after we were married and of course I can easily prove it. You are also my child and the child of your father, but unfortunately you were born out of wedlock!”
    “What are you saying? I do not . . . understand!” Lalitha cried. Lady Studley made it brutally clear.
    She was to be Sophie and Sophie was to be she. Only as a concession her father was not an unknown Army Officer but Sir John.
    “Do you suppose anyone will question what I say when we reach London?” Lady Studley had asked.
    Lalitha could not answer. She knew no-one in London and who would believe her word against Lady Studley’s?
    She was defeated. There was nothing she could do and nothing she could say.
    It was intolerable to think that this common, pushing woman was pretending to be her mother.
    She had taken her mother’s place and had appropriated every penny.
    But there was no-one to whom she could turn; no-one she felt would listen to her story.
    Beaten and knocked about by Lady Studley, she had no presence.
    She did not even look, she told herself, like a lady anymore, but the slatternly love-child who Lady Studley told her was kept only out of charity.
    She was also to call this usurper “Mama” as she had called her own mother.
    If she forgot to do so Lady Studley beat her, and after a time it was almost impossible to go on fighting, even for her mother’s memory.
    Lady Studley planned her entrance into Society on her arrival in London with a cleverness which Lalitha would have been bound to admire if she herself had not had to suffer in the process.
    The money that she had raised was not going to last long; only long enough, as far as Lady Studley was concerned, for Sophie to make an important marriage.
    For Lalitha