Her first precise recollection was also pleasant. She
thought of the way in which Royson had carried her in his arms not so
many hours earlier, and the memory banished all others for many
minutes.
If she smiled and blushed a little, it may be pleaded that she was
twenty years of age, and had passed her girlhood amidst surroundings
from which young men eligible to carry young ladies in their arms, or
even hold them there, were rigorously excluded. Not that her
grandfather was a misanthrope, but his interests were bound up so
thoroughly in Egyptian research that his friends were, for the most
part, elderly savants with kindred tastes. The wreck, of the _Bokhara_,
too, with Irene's father and mother among its passengers, had helped to
cut him off from the social world. When the grief of that tragedy had
yielded to the passing years he hardly realized that the little child
who had crept into his affections was growing up into a beautiful and
light-hearted girl. Quite insensibly she assimilated herself to his
hobbies and studies, became mistress of his London house and fine
estate in Berkshire, and, by operation of forces more effective in
their way than any Puritanical safeguards, lived apart from the gay
throng in which she was eminently fitted to take a leading place.
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