These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither
came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor
Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she
stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent,
ungenial guest.
The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim,
blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian
Embassy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given
up his secretaryship after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city
that he and his wife both hated.
They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both
liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died,
leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were
well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the
certainty that their children would one day be in still better
circumstances.
One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the
brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged
eighteen months.
She was a thin woman of thirty-six or seven, with large dark eyes,
somewhat hollow now, and a brown vivid face on which life had put
several deep lines--all of which, though unbeautiful in themselves, were
good lines, and made for character.
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