ut he never went near
his native country. For years and years he had lived abroad--not in any
settled place of residence: they would travel about, and remain a year
or two in one place, a year or two in another, as the whim suited them.
A respectable, portly man, of quiet and gentlemanly manners, looking as
little like one who need be afraid of the laws of his own land as can
be. Neither is it said or insinuated that he was afraid of them. A
gentleman who knew him had told, many years before, in answer to a
doubt, that Crosby was as free to go home and establish himself in a
mansion in Piccadilly as the best of them. But he had lost fearfully by
some roguish scheme, like the South Sea Bubble, and could not live in
the style he once had done, therefore preferred remaining abroad. Mrs.
Crosby was a pleasant, chatty woman given to take as much gayety as
she could get, and Helena Crosby was a remarkably fine grown girl
of seventeen. You might have given her some years on it had you been
guessing her age, for she was no child, either in appearance or manners,
and never had been. She was an heiress, too. An uncle had left her
twenty thousand pounds, and at her mother's death she would have ten
thousand more. The Count Otto von Stalkenberg heard of the thirty
thousand pounds, and turned his fierce moustache and his eyes on Miss
Helena.

"Thirty thousand pounds and von handsome girls!" cogitated he, for he
prided himself upon his English. "It is just what I have been seeking
after."

He found the rumor touching her fortune to be correct, and from that
time was seldom apart from the Crosbys. They were as pleased to have
his society as he was to be in theirs, for was he not the Count von
Stalkenberg? And the other visitors at Stalkenberg looking on with envy,
would have given their ears to be honored with a like intimacy.

One day there thundered down in a vehicle the old Baron von Stalkenberg.
The old chief had come to pay a visit of ceremony to the Crosbys. And
the host of the Ludwig Bad, as he appeared himself to marshal this
chieftain to their saloon, bowed his body low with every step.

"Room there, room there, for the mighty Baron von Stalkenberg."

The mighty baron had come to invite them to a feast at his castle, where
no feast had ever been made so grand before as this would be; and
Otto had _carte blanche_ to engage other distinguished sojourners at
Stalkenberg, English, French, and natives, who had been civil to h