A Fair Fraud — page 23: what you’re looking at

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

12 A Fair Fraud now and again; but this was mainly to please his father, for Captain Kenneth did not care about what he contemptuously termed ‘ chicken slaughter.’ Of course, earlier in the year, he devoted himself to the London season, so that his time was generally planned out entirely to his own satisfaction and for his own pleasures. In all these varied pleasures little Marion Blake did not count for anything at all. _Kenneth Drury’s attitude towards his parents’ adopted niece was one of kindly indifference. He was at first very much amused at the idea of his mother having a companion, and looked upon her advent asa capital joke. He wanted to know if the ‘new girl’ might carry up his shaving water, or bring down his slippers when he came in from hunting, and if he might ask her to sew on his shirt buttons. If he had only known it, Marion would have blacked his boots with delight, and have counted it an ineffable joy to darn his socks. But naturally she did not do any of these menial offices for him; because there were Mrs Drury’s lady’s maid and the upper housemaid to work for him, to say nothing of his own valet. And, of course, nobody on earth knew how gladly Marion would have slaved her little fingers to the bone for him. For that was her secret, locked fast in the deepest recesses of her own heart, and the only good thing about it