Desert Love

ood by

g 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 wh

otherless, had led a glor

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 proposi

h broke riotous, frivolous curls, the inside held a distinctly active and developed brain, wh

ught up in convention bound England, she had a heart as big as her outrageous longing fo

rvatories, 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

s 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 Mond

good time" as seen from the standpoint of the a

master, then a home, and t

her home, she was positively certain she did not want lodge gates and forelock-pulling peasantry, nor tame deer inside elaborate palings, no

gh 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

look for work off her own bat, and actually found it in that occupation which, far less paid tha

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 f

be 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 ca

it out, and out, and out, rather than return to ask the help of those whose