Count Villars had just arrived in England, having at an extraordinarily early age--for he could be scarcely forty yet--been appointed Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James; and there were quite a number of people resident in that parish who remembered very distinctly how desperately he had fallen in love with Catherine Thurso twelve years ago, when she had first come out, and, as her mother expressed it, taken "the shine" out of the rest of the girls of the year. Then, so the world still remembered, rather perplexing events had happened in rapid succession. Her engagement to young Villars had been actually supposed to have taken place, but hardly had that become news when it was contradicted, and Villars, then a junior secretary in the Embassy of which he was now the head, had been transferred elsewhere; while before the season was over Catherine Etheridge's engagement to her present husband was formally announced, and was followed before the end of the year by her marriage. For Mrs. Etheridge had always meant that her daughter should marry Lord Raynham, as he then was; and if anybody thought that her plans were going to be interfered with by any volcanic young Austrian, however brilliant and handsome, without a penny of his own, and removed by half a dozen lives from the succession to the huge estates of Villars (those lives certainly made a lot of difference), she would show him his mistake. There were, in fact, many who thought that Mrs. Etheridge's plans were going to be interfered with; but their mistake had been duly demonstrated to them when Catherine Etheridge so soon after became Catherine Raynham.
Rudolf Villars, in this long interval of twelve years between his abrupt departure and his return to England, had done everything except marry, and in all that he did Fortune had declared herself to be his parent. His really brilliant gifts had reaped their reward before he was too old to care about success, relations neither near nor dear had died, and he was now next in succession to the estates of Villars--with only a decrepit old great-uncle between him and them--and Ambassador to the English Court. To the world at large this situation, which just now was being rather largely discussed, had elements of interest. It was known that Catherine Thurso and her husband were not romantically attached to each other; it was conjectured that, since Rudolf Villars had remained single, he was still romantically attached to her, and it was impossible to help wondering whether at last she would show signs of being attached to anybody. To the world she was, in spite of her beauty, her charm, her brilliance, a somewhat irritating enigma. All the glory of her belonged to nobody. She did not care for her husband, which was a pity, but what made it worse was that she did not care for anybody else. And so many men had been wildly devoted to her, and of them all not one had met with a single particle of success, or, to do her justice, of encouragement, for she had nothing in common with the flirt. She was not in the least shocked, either, at their protestations. If she had been, her attitude would, at any rate, have been a moral and an intelligible one. But she merely laughed at them, and told them not to be absurd. If they persisted, she yawned. She forgot all about it, too, a week afterwards, even if she had been made to yawn very much, asked them to the house as usual, and was specially friendly.