[Dark Saint Alaick]

"You have the looks, Sandra," her mother sometimes told her, "far better than most girls, but you say the words as though you were reading a story. You must be it, you must live it."
"She may wake up when she falls in love," her father had said. They both died when she was seventeen. She got a job as a model in a W End dressmaking establishment and her poise and her promising figure gave her some success. Before she was nineteen she met and married Captain Oswald Henshaw.
She thought she loved him and she imagined he was rich, He certainly spent money freely. She heard mention of five thousand pounds and supposed that was his annual income. She did not know it was his entire capital, left him by his father, and he was busy getting rid of it as quickly as he could. It is a tribute perhaps to his skill as a gambler--or to his luck--that it had lasted so long. At his suggestion she had put her modest savings, about three hundred pounds, into what he called their joint account so that they could both draw on it. Now that was gone, too. Luckily she had no debts, her parents had at least taught her the folly of that.
"I suppose I can go back to old Harbottle," she said at last. "What will you do?"
"I don't want you to go back to Harbottle, darling, to wear his rags from evening gowns to swim suits and be stared at by the other women and the men they bring with them, like a prize beast at a show."
"That is how we met."
"I took you from it. I don't want you to go back."
"What will you do?" she asked again, perhaps with a show of derision.
"What can I do? I would like the sort of job Tony Somers got--secretary to a rich American who really only wanted to see the high spots. But such chances are few and far between."