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everything that it represented.
    When her mother had died there had been no one to whom she could pour out her misery, and later people often got the impression that she was callous because she never showed her emotions. They did not guess that she was often desperately lonely and forlorn.
    By the time she was sixteen she was fiercely determined to achieve all the things she had never had, but it was not until three years later that she thought of fashion modeling as the key to her ambitions. She arrived in London with just enough money to pay for a training course and cheap lodgings, and at first the other students, who were mostly girls from comfortable middle-class homes, had raised their eyebrows at her shabby clothes and apparent lack of the attributes that would make a successful model. But the director of the model school, an astute, and experienced woman named Mary Lyall, had recognized that Andrea had something that prettier girls lacked. When she started her training, Andrea was a girl that most people would have overlooked. By the end of it she had developed that rare and indefinable star quality that prompted Mrs. Lyall, who also ran a model agency, to help her through the first few weeks before bookings began to come in in increasing numbers.
    Andrea took her success calmly, saving most of her earnings and continuing to concentrate on her work as hard as she had at the beginning. She knew that, like film starlets, models often had a meteoric rise to fame and an equally sudden descent into obscurity. She knew, too, that however successful she might be, there were hundreds of other girls fighting for a front place and that her own popularity would not last forever. It was then that she thought about marriage as a means of obtaining permanent security in her new life. Her mother’s life had been ruined by a foolish infatuation for a weak, shiftless man, and she had seen many attractive, happy girls turned into embittered wives through living with relatives or in drab furnished apartments. Regarding love as an emotional delusion that soon wore off under the exigencies of day-to-day living, she had decided to marry for money.
    So far, two men had wanted to marry her. One of them was a young accountant whose income was probably less than her own and whose prospects were uncertain. The other was a textile manufacturer, a widower with a son only a few years younger than Andrea. She guessed that his feeling for her was a middle-aged infatuation, and although she considered his proposal very seriously for some time, in the end she refused it, although she knew that wealthy men were seldom young or even passably good-looking, and that this deficiency was part of the price she would have to pay. That a man as rich or as presentable as Justin Templar should want to marry her had never occurred to her, and now, although it was the realization of all her aims, she was suddenly full of doubts and uncertainty.
    What had he said ? “ Remember that you have just as much to offer as I have.”
    Frowning slightly, she opened her purse and studied her reflection in the mirror of her compact. Did he really think that her face and figure were an adequate exchange for his name and all that went with it?
    Thrusting the compact back in her purse, she lighted a cigarette and tried to analyze the situation from his point of view. He had said that he shared her views on the subject of what people called love, so what would influence his choice of a wife? Not social position, for Jill had said that he had been the target of matchmaking mothers for years without result. Evidently he wanted a wife who would be a showpiece like his house in Syon Place or his gleaming Bentley or the bloodstock horse he had ridden over the moor in Cornwall.
    The best that money can buy, Andrea thought wryly. Apparently I am it. Well, he's old enough to know his own mind, I suppose.
    She finished her cigarette and washed up the tea things and went to bed.
    The next