es to win the admiration of a man of the world who possessed
none of them. Count Sergius said that the lad must suffer nothing. His
intrigues with the daughter of a Polish anarchist were both dangerous
and foolish. And was he not already the acknowledged lover of Anna
Gessner, whom he must marry upon his return to London. Certainly, it
would be very wrong not to lock him up, and he, Sergius, was not going
to take the responsibility of any other course upon his already
over-burdened shoulders.

These being his ideas, he found it amusing enough to meet Alban at the
dinner-table and to speak of to-morrow and its programme. The reply to
the cable they had dispatched to London lay already warm in his pocket,
sent straight to him from the post-office as the police had directed. It
was fitting that he should open the ball with a lie about this, and add
thereto any other pleasant fancy which a fertile imagination dictated.

"Gessner does not cable us," he said at that moment of the repast when
the glasses are first filled and the tongue is loosed. "I suppose he has
gone over to Paris again as he hinted might be the case. If there is no
news to-morrow, we must reconsider the arguments and see how we stand.
You know that I am perfectly willing to be guided by him and will do
nothing of my own initiative. If he can procure the old man's freedom,
I will be the first to congratulate you. Meanwhile, I am not to forget
that we have a box at the opera and that _Huguenots_ is on the bill.
When I am not in musical circles, I confess my enjoyment of _Huguenots_.
Meyerbeer always seemed to me a grand old charlatan who should have run
a modern show in New York. He wrote one masterpiece and some five miles
of rubbish--but why decry a great work because there are also those
which are not great. Besides, I am not musician enough really to enjoy
the Ring. If it were not for the pretty women who come to my box to
escape ennui, I would find Wagner intolerable."

Alban, very quiet and not a little excited to-night, differed from this
opinion altogether.

"My father was a musician," he said. "I believe that if he had not been
a parson, he would have been a great musician. I don't know very much
about music myself, but the first time that Mr. Gessner took me to hear
one of Wagner's operas, I seemed to live in a new world. It could not
have been just the desire to like it, for I had made up my mind that it
would be very dry. There is something in