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Jill stood by herself!

Personally I consider as infinitely boring those descriptions written at length anent the past lives of the characters, male and female, which go to the building of a novel, so in as few words as possible will try to outline the years which had brought Jill Carden to the dreary task of waiting hand and foot upon the whimsies of a neurotic German woman of great wealth, and still greater disinclination to part with the smallest coin of any realm she might be travelling through.

Jill, an only child and motherless, had led a glorious care-free existence.

Adored by her father and her two friends, Moll, otherwise the Honourable Mary Bingham pronounced Beam, of the neighbouring estate, and Jack, otherwise Sir John Wetherbourne, Baronet, of the next county, big brother to Jill and worshipper at the shrine of Moll. Jill was also loved by all who waited on her, and sought after by not a few on account of her great wealth, and had laughed her way through seventeen years of life, to find herself suddenly minus father and money, with nothing left in fact but an estate mortgaged to the smallest pebble, and a heart-whole proposition from her chum Moll to "just come over the wall" and restart laughing her way as her adopted sister through the bit of life which might stretch from the moment of disaster to such time that she should find a life companion with whom she could settle down and live happily ever after!

But although Jill's head was outwardly covered with great plaits of auburn hair, through which broke riotous, frivolous curls, the inside held a distinctly active and developed brain, which had acquired the habit of thinking deeply upon such subjects as woman, wife and motherhood.

Added to this, which is already quite enough to put out of gear the life of any girl brought up in convention bound England, she had a heart as big as her outrageous longing for, and love of adventure, neither of which bignesses she had so far been able to satisfy.

As I have said this was quite bad enough, but through and above all, her whole rather exceptional being was desirous of love. Not the shape which clothes its diseased body in soiled robes of imitation something at one and elevenpence three farthings per yard, and under ferns in conservatories, in punts up back-waters, in stifling tea-rooms, hotels, theatres and night-clubs, exchanges sly look for sly look and soiled mouth for soiled kisses, in its endeavours to pass itself off as that wonder figure which, radiant of brow and humorous of mouth, deep of breast and profound of thought, stands motionless in high and by-ways with hands outstretched to those futile figures, blindly hurrying past the Love they fondly imagine is to be found in the front row of the chorus, the last row of the cinema, or the unrestrained licence of the country house.

Jill had never flirted and therefore had known no kiss excepting her father's matutinal and nocturnal peck. She looked upon her beautiful body as some jewel to be placed in the hands of the man she loved upon her wedding-night, so it was as unsoiled and as untainted as her mind, although she knew that once she loved she would go down before that mighty force as a tree before a storm. Dull, you will say all this. May be! but mighty refreshing in these days when amourette follows amourette as surely as Monday follows Sunday, the only difference in the stock being the trade mark, which stamps the one with the outline of a perfect limousine, and the other with the front seat on the top of an omnibus; though believe me the Mondays and Sundays differ not at all.

Jill's ideas on franchise and suffrage, and a "good time" as seen from the standpoint of the average society girl or woman were absolutely nil.

She wanted first of all a master, then a home, and then children, many of them.

Her idea of love was utter submission to the man she should love. Her ideal of happiness his happiness, and although she had no fixed idea of her home, she was positively certain she did not want lodge gates and forelock-pulling peasantry, nor tame deer inside elaborate palings, nor the white-capped nurse stiff with starch trundling a perambulator with a fat, ordinary, rosy heir to the palings, deer, and pullers of locks.

So she sweetly but very definitely said no to a certain millionaire, who had earned his banking account and the thanks of many thousands by his invention of a non-popping champagne cork, and who, adoring the girl, had hastened the very day the news of the smash had spread through the country, like fire on a windy day, to lay his portly self and all that thereunto adhered at her beautiful feet. The disgust of her relatives upon her want of common sense was outspoken; for having overstocked their respective quivers with commonplace female arrows, they quite naturally looked with dismay upon an almost beautiful and quite penniless and homeless girl about whom, after having read the will they referred to as "poor Jill, for whom I suppose we must do something don't you know?" with a quavering inflection at the end of the phrase.

But Jill did not stop on refusing the eligible owner of an unmortgaged estate. No! she set out to look for work off her own bat, and actually found it in that occupation which, far less paid than more, opens up a perfect vista of possible adventures under the guise of a travelling companion.

She spoke French, German, and Italian like natives, which was all to the good. She danced like a Vernon Castle, knew almost as much about fencing as a Saviolo, shot like a George V., and rode like a cowboy, all of which qualifications she erased from her list on the termination of the freezing half-hour of her first interview with her first would-be employer, who, until the enumeration of the above sporting qualifications, had seemed desirous of taking her along with a bronchitic pug to winter in Bath.

Since then she had done Europe and Africa pretty well with never the suspicion of an adventure, and, when you meet her on the station of Ismailiah, where you change for Port Said, she was returning from Australia, with a wardrobe at last beginning to fret about the hem, and shine around the seams, a condition accounted for by the emaciated condition of her purse; a memory of good things and hours worn thin by the constant nerve-wracking routine of capsules, hot drinks, hot water bottles, moods and shawls; and a fully developed rebellion in her whole being against the never-ending vista which stretched far into the future, of other such hours, days, months, yea! even years!

But everything was capped by a still more fully developed decision to brave it out, and out, and out, rather than return to ask the help of those whose hand-clasp had weakened in ratio to the dwindling of the gold in her coffers.