I would be greatly obliged if you
would find out where they are, those good people. You seem to be a
friend of my boy's, baron. Help him, and he will be grateful to you.
It is not such a very terrible thing that a great artist should love a
noble's daughter, after all, though I used to think so." Benoni
laughed, that strange laugh which Nino had described,--a laugh that
seemed to belong to another age.

"You amuse me with your prejudices about nobility," he said, and his
brown eyes flashed and twinkled again. "The idea of talking about
nobility in this age! You might as well talk of the domestic economy
of the Garden of Eden."

"But you are yourself a noble--a baron," I objected.

"Oh, I am anything you please," said Benoni. "Some idiot made a baron
of me the other day because I lent him money and he could not pay it.
But I have some right to it, after all, for I am a Jew. The only real
nobles are Welshmen and Jews. You cannot call anything so ridiculously
recent as the European upper classes a nobility. Now I go straight
back to the creation of the world, like all my countrymen. The
Hibernians get a factitious reputation for antiquity by saying that
Eve married an Irishman after Adam died, and that is about as much
claim as your European nobles have to respectability. Bah! I know
their beginnings, very small indeed."

"You also seem to have strong prejudices on the subject," said I, not
wishing to contradict a guest in my house.

"So strong that it amounts to having no prejudices at all. Your boy
wants to marry a noble damosel. In Heaven's name let him do it. Let us
manage it amongst us. Love is a grand thing. I have loved several
women all their lives. Do not look surprised. I am a very old man;
they have all died, and at present I am not in love with anybody. I
suppose it cannot last long, however. I loved a woman once on a
time"--Benoni paused. He seemed to be on the verge of a soliloquy, and
his strange, bright face, which seemed illuminated always with a
deathless vitality, became dreamy and looked older. But he
recollected himself and rose to go. His eye caught sight of the guitar
that hung on the wall.

"Ah," he cried suddenly, "music is better than love, for it lasts; let
us make music." He dropped his hat and stick and seized the
instrument. In an instant it was tuned and he began to perform the
most extraordinary feats of agility with his fingers that I ever
beheld. Some of it was very beautiful, and