ganized the day before at Madame Steno's, and
just the one whom the intolerable marquis had defamed with so much
ardor, the father of beautiful Fanny Hafner, Baron Justus himself. The
renowned founder of the 'Credit Austro-Dalmate' was a small, thin
man, with blue eyes of an acuteness almost insupportable, in a face of
neutral color. His ever-courteous manner, his attire, simple and neat,
his speech serious and discreet, gave to him that species of distinction
so common to old diplomatists. But the dangerous adventurer was betrayed
by the glance which Hafner could not succeed in veiling with indifferent
amiability. The man-of-the-world, which he prided himself upon having
become, was visible through all by certain indefinable trifles, and
above all by those eyes, of a restlessness so singular in so wealthy a
man, indicating an enigmatical and obscure past of dark and contrasting
struggles, of covetous sharpness, of cold calculation and indomitable
energy. Fanatical Montfanon, who abused the daughter with such
unjustness, judged the father justly. The son of a Jew of Berlin and
of a Dutch Protestant, Justus Hafner was inscribed on the civil state
registers as belonging to his mother's faith. But the latter died when
Justus was very young, and he was not reared in any other liturgy than
that of money. From his father, a persevering and skilful jeweller, but
too prudent to risk or gain much, he learned the business of precious
stones, to which he added that of laces, paintings, old materials,
tapestries, rare furniture.

An infallible eye, the patience of a German united with his Israelitish
and Dutch extraction, soon amassed for him a small capital, which his
father's bequest augmented. At twenty-seven Justus had not less than
five hundred thousand marks. Two imprudent operations on the Bourse,
enterprises to force fortune and to obtain the first million, ruined the
too-audacious courtier, who began again the building up of his fortune
by becoming a diamond broker.

He went to Paris, and there, in a wretched little room on the Rue
Montmartre, in three years, he made his second capital. He then managed
it so well that in 1870, at the time of the war, he had made good his
losses. The armistice found him in England, where he had married the
daughter of a Viennese agent, in London, for the purpose of starting
a vast enterprise of revictualing the belligerent armies. The enormous
profits made by the father-in-law and the son-