The Luck of the Darrells Author:James Payn 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 in. FATHER AND DAUGHTER. The situation in which our heroine now found herself was embarrassing enough; to have travelled alone from Paris to Londo... more »n, to have found no one to meet her, according to promise, at the station, and then to discover that the address at which she ought to have arrived had no existence, would to most girls of eighteen have seemed little short of a catastrophe. But Hester Darrell was not like ' most girls.' Her nature was so simple that she had been nicknamed amongst her school-fellows Daisy Darrell, a sobriquet to which their imaginations had been doubtless assisted by her delicate complexion; but her simplicity was not of that sort which is akin to folly. She had indeed a quite unusual stock of ' saving common sense,' and what is still rarer in persons of her age and sex, a very keen sense of humour. Indeed it is so very rare, that before confessing that it was this sense which now came uppermost with her, I must, in justice to Hester, remind my readers that she was no mere country girl, who finds herself for the first time in London and alone. She had friends, though apparently not in Piccadilly, to whom she could have gone if necessary and awaited events, and the consciousness of this fact no doubt enabled her to take a cheerful view of matters. At all events it struck her as so exceedingly funny that the cabman should have selected Apsley House as her place of residence, that she could hardly restrain her mirth. ' Indeed you are quite wrong,' she protested, almost with tears in her eyes, as the cabman was about to drive within the great gates. It was no more likely to be her papa's home, than the equestrian statue over the waywas likely to be her papa. Indeed, since he was in a cavalry regiment, the latter suggestion was on the whol...« less