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Alchester had not suggested after his father’s death, that he should make his postponed visit to The Towers, Cassandra contrived in one way or another to make enquiries about him.
    She had found, as she had anticipated, that he was incessantly in the company of the Gaiety Girls or of other actresses.
    “Alchester is known as ‘The Merry Marquis’,” one of Cassandra’s hunting acquaintances told her. “Have you never met him?”
    “No,” Cassandra answered. “I was only interested because, as you know, Papa and the old Duke did a lot of racing together, and I was just wondering if the new holder of the title had kept up the stable.”
    “If he has, I expect he will soon have to sell up,” her friend replied.
    “Why?” Cassandra enquired.
    “I believe he is badly dipped.”
    ‘If this was so,’ Cassandra asked herself, ‘why then did not the new Duke of Alchester fall back on the arrangements which had been made before his father’s death and push ahead with the marriage which would bring him, through his wife, an enormous fortune?’
    She could find only one reasonable explanation.
    It was that, despite everything her father might say, the Duke was in love and had no wish to make an arranged marriage.
    By the time the winter of 1885 come and there was no word from him, she was convinced that her father’s plans had finally and completely gone astray and that they were unlikely to hear any more from the Duke.
    But Sir James was optimistic.
    “There could be no question of your being married while Alchester is in deep mourning,” he said. “He will wait the conventional year. Then I am sure we shall take up the negotiations where they were left off.”
    ‘I will not be treated in such a manner!’ Cassandra told herself, although she did not say the words aloud to her father.
    Every month that passed strengthened her determination. She would not marry a man whose heart was given elsewhere, and who wanted her for one reason and one reason only, that she was rich!
    She saw now how childish her expectation had been that because she was pretty he would fall in love with her.
    She might have far more brains and certainly be far more cultured than the women with whom he associated in London, but that was not to say that he would prefer such qualities.
    She took to studying the photographs published of the actresses who were beguiling London audiences.
    It was hard not to see that they certainly looked far more attractive and indeed more amusing than the stiff portraits of the society girls with whom they competed for the gentlemen’s affections.
    There were exceptions of course, if one compared them with the beautiful young Lady Warwick or the goddess-like Countess of Dudley.
    ‘But who,’ Cassandra asked herself, ‘looks as attractive as Nelly Farran of whom the theatre critics say, “The Gaiety without Nelly is unthinkable,” or Connie Gilchrist who has found fame with a skipping rope?’
    Instead of cutting out from the newspapers pictures of the Duke of Alchester, Cassandra began to collect reproductions of the photographic beauties.
    Photographs of them filled the shop-windows and were in many of the illustrated papers.
    There had been loud criticism about one of the poses assumed by Maud Branscombe who was the first of the photographic beauties. She had figured in a study which portrayed “The Rock of Ages.”
    “Can you imagine that woman daring to display herself clinging to the Cross?” Aunt Eleanor had asked. “I cannot think why the Bishops do not protest about it!”
    There were a great many other lovely smiling actresses whose photographs could be bought for less than a shilling.
    Cassandra had been amused when her father, protesting about the photographs that had been taken of her in York, produced from a locked drawer in his desk some pictures of Mrs. Langtry.
    “This is the sort of pose that I want,” he said.
    He showed her a picture of “The Jersey Lily” leaning gracefully on a