o fixedly, indeed, that
he seemed to feel some apology necessary for it.

"Forgive me," cried he; "but I could not help staring at the prodigy of
a man content to be himself."

"I have not said that," replied I. "I only said I was incapable of
feeling myself to be any other."

"You plume yourself upon your birth then, doubtless," added he; "and so
should I, if I knew how to get rid of my father. What were your people:
you said they were not French?"

Had the question been put to me half an hour before, as we sat over
our wine, I have little doubt that, in the expansiveness of such a
situation, I should have told him all that I knew or suspected of my
family. The season of confidence, however, had passed. We were walking
along a crowded thoroughfare; our talk was desultory, as the objects
about were various; and so I coined some history of my family for the
occasion, ascribing my birth to a very humble source, and my rank as one
of the meanest.

"Your father was, however, English," said he; "so much you know?"

"Yes," said I, "that point there is no doubt about."

"Is he alive?"

"No, he is dead a great many years back."

"How did he die, or where? Excuse these questions, which I have only to
say are not out of idle importunity."

I own that I did not feel easy under this cross-examination. It
might mean more than I liked to avow even to myself. At all events, I
resolved, whatever his object, to evade it; and at once gave him some
absurd narrative of my father having served in the war of the Low
Countries, where he married a Frenchwoman or a Fleming; that he died, of
some fever of the country, at a small fishing town on the Dutch coast,
leaving me an orphan, since my mother survived him but a few months.

"All this is excellent," cried he, enthusiastically. "It could not be
better by any possibility. Forgive me, Gervois, till I can explain my
meaning to you more fully; but what you have just told me has filled my
heart with delight. You 'll see how Madame von Geysiger will receive you
when she hears this."

I started back with astonishment. Could it possibly be the case that
my stupid story might chime in with the facts of some real history; and
should I thus be involved in the web of some tangled incidents in which
I had rightfully no share? There was shame and falsehood both in such a
situation, and I shrank from it with disgust.

"I will not go to this house, Count," said I, resolutely. "I foresee
tha