Anonymous

Maude Cameron And Her Guardian

Volume 1

Chapter One

Charles Cameron was forty- four years old and had achieved the happy fortune of being able to select his practice when and as he chose, thanks to an unexpected inheritance from an uncle whom he had dimly remembered from his childhood and who had settled in India some forty years ago. Thus Charles Cameron was able to travel on the Continent during the summer and to enjoy the finest food and vintage wines when it pleased him.

His own parents had died when he was in hip twenties, by which time he had become a barrister’ s clerk in London, the city of his birth. In due course, he passed his examination and was engaged as a solicitor for the same firm with which he had spent his legal apprenticeship.

He had found the profession of law satisfying as to status in his community and because of the respectability of the profession which accrued to members of it, and his firm was quite proper and oldfashioned so that the litigation in which he was involved was mainly that of estates, transfers of property, and the like. There were no criminal cases, as the senior member of his firm regarded them as demeaning to the dignity of a reputable lawyer.

Charles Cameron had conducted himself with becoming propriety during his years with the firm, but he had never married. It was not that he did not enjoy the companionship of the opposite sex: quite he contrary. It was just that he did not wish to be saddled with the encumbrances that a wife and family would give him, since he wished to feel free to seek his fortune where the wind blew. Had he wished to marry, doubtless the fact that he was employed in one of London’ s leading legal offices would have prevented him from seeking a livelihood abroad if the opportunity had presented itself. But perhaps, too, with a bachelor’ s cynicism, he had decided that too many of his friends found their pleasures curtailed when they took unto themselves a wife.

Discreetly, then, he had an occasional mistress, taking care that none of his associates was aware of the identity of these lights of love. He was gallant and virile, and rather prepossessing, so it was easy to see that members of the opposite sex could readily be attracted to him.

Physically, he was almost six feet in height, with pleasant blue eyes, regular features, a sensuous mouth given a masculine imperiousness by a carefully trimmed moustache, firm chin and straight nose. His hair was brown, and in his mature age showed as yet no signs of grey.

The inheritance from his uncle came to him when he was thirtyfive, an at that time the thought occurred to him to withdraw gradually from practice so that he could have more time to himself and his relaxations. At the very outset he purchased a pleasant little house in the country, about forty- five miles to the northeast of London, and spent most of his summers there when he was not traveling, and an occasional weekend- particularly when in the throes of an amorous affair with one of his pro tem sweethearts.

In his lovemaking, as in his own decisive handling of business affairs at his office, he believed in taking the initiative and being aggressive. Innately, he found himself with a predilection for taking even more authority and command with the opposite sex. This if no way implied brutality or jealousy, but on the other hand, being well read in erotica, he had chanced upon several volumes which he discovered in a Parisian bookstall on the occasion of his first trip abroad following the inheritance. These books had detailed accounts of lovemaking wherein the hero demonstrated an imperious control over a mistress or a love- slave by employing a judicious amount of corporal chastisement. The idea intrigued him and from time to time, when he found a mistress who was rather less inhibited than the average young woman, he sought to introduce into the loveplay and the wooing some of this Gallic imaginativeness. In the main, he found that it was well received and that it led to exciting culmination.