The Ring O' Bells Etc Author:George Robert Sims Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FRANK REDGRAVE'S WIFE. ' What's the matter, Frank dear ?' Frank Redgrave looked at his young wife, muttered ' Oh, nothing,' and went on reading a letter wh... more »ich had arrived that morning from England, and had been handed to him as he sat down to breakfast in their charming sitting-room in the Hotel de Londres in Rome. The contents could not have been altogether pleasant, for as he read it the young aristocrat's handsome face grew more and more serious in its expression. The Hon. Frank Redgrave had done a very foolish thing. Being just twenty-two, the heir to a title as old as the Conquest, and to estates of considerable magnitude, he had fallen in love with a charming girl who was governess at a ladies' school next door to the house where Frank visited a friend who crammed with an army tutor. Frank was eighteen in those days, and Lottie Vane was a year younger. Poor Lottie's position was not a happy one, and there is no wonder thatshe surrendered herself willingly to the delicious novelty of being loved by some one. She had been sent from India to be a pupil at the school where she was then a governess. Her mother had died soon afterwards, and her father, an officer in the Indian Army, had six months later been killed in a frontier war. When his affairs were investigated it was found that his estate would not satisfy his creditors; and among the bills left unpaid was a year's account for the education, boarding, and lodging of his orphan daughter. Lottie Vane was fourteen when she found herself in this terrible position—an orphan and penniless, and utterly at the mercy of a prim and starchy schoolmistress, who looked upon her as a bad debt. But primness and starchincss are not always the signs of a bad heart, and Miss Morton, the lady in question, could not make up ...« less