A Fair Fraud — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

4 A Fair Fraud name was to be met with in the lists of guests at fashionable houses, and he was even some- times amongst those chosen few who were bidden to the entertainments of the most ex- alted personages, And Marion Blake knew all this very well indeed, because she frequently read all about it in the Morning Post or the Court Journal, or in some of the many society papers which it was her daily duty to read aloud to Captain Kenneth Drury’s mother. For that, alas! was Marion’s status in life. She was Mrs Drury’s ‘com- panion.’ — Not exactly what is called a ‘paid com- panion,’ because she received no salary. Mr and Mrs Drury had adopted her. She was one of a large family of seven girls, who at the death of their father had been left absolutely penniless in the world, and their mother had been Mr Drury’s second cousin. The relationship was not therefore a very close one, although Marion, by their own desire, called Mr and Mrs Drury ‘ uncle and aunt,’ and was’ told to look upon their son as a cousin. These’ seven orphan girls had been living at: the time of their father’s death in a village in a northern county, and their destitution was so utter when their father’s small pension expired with him, that the vicar of the parish had made it his business first to discover and then to COnnicbooe Sp! C(O)