A Waiting Race Author:Edmund Hodgson Yates 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: CHAPTER III. WHAT THE WORLD SAID. The advertisement of Lady Helen Fleet- wood's death, duly inserted in the various London papers, recalled to a large numb... more »er of very worthy persons the fact that Lady Helen Fleetwood had ever existed. They had forgotten that fact years and years ago. Scores of other women had been 'talked of since then, and had afforded delicious meals to those who lived on their friends' reputation. The men who had been young men about town at the time of the Reginald Connell escapade, who remembered Lady Helen as a remarkably handsome young woman, and who had expressed their wonderment at the time of the whole affair having been kept so snug and quiet, were nowon the verge of fogeyisrn, even if they had not crossed the barrier and become members of that ludicrous yet pitiable estate. The girls who had been Lady Helen's contemporaries, and who had listened with bated breath to such versions of the story as they could with difficulty pick up—conversation at that time had not ripened into its present free-and-easy state, and subjects of the kind were strictly tabooed in the presence of young people—were now matrons with daughters of their own. some married and some marriageable, and repeated the name, which so many years ago they had been taught to ignore, with wondering curiosity. Reginald Connell himself, a grizzled, worn-looking, but still handsome man, was staying with his daughter at a country house in Norfolk for the pheasant-shooting, when at the breakfast table a young man read out from the Morning Post a paragraph announcing the death of the whom nearly twenty years beforehe had so seriously compromised. Mr. Con- nell (he had long since renounced his military prefix) paused'for an instant in the act of demolishing his second egg, and listened attentiv...« less