Mademoiselle Thiebart was very glad to exchange the uncertainties of a first floor in North Audley Street for the comfort and security of Fellside Manor, with a salary of one hundred and fifty pounds a year.
Both Fraeulein and Mademoiselle had been quick to discover that Lady Lesbia was the apple of her grandmother's eye, while Lady Mary was comparatively an outsider.
So it came about that Mary's education was in somewise a mere picking-up of the crumbs which fell from Lesbia's table, and that she was allowed in a general way to run wild.

She was much quicker at any intellectual exercise than Lesbia.

She learned the lessons that were given her at railroad speed, and rattled off her exercises with a slap-dash penmanship which horrified the neat and niggling Fraeulein, and then rushed off to the lake or mountain, and by this means grew browner and browner, and more indelibly freckled day by day, thus widening the gulf between herself and her beauty sister.
But it is not to be supposed that because Lesbia was beautiful, Mary was plain.

This is very far from the truth.

Mary had splendid hazel eyes, with a dancing light in them when she smiled, ruddy auburn hair, white teeth, a deeply-dimpled chin, and a vivacity and archness of expression, which served only in her present state of tutelage for the subjugation of old women and shepherd boys.