eable party, including the divine Julia, who was singing little
songs very prettily and accompanying herself on a guitar.

"'You ask me why I look so pale?'" sang Julia, just as Barty
entered: and red as a rose was she.

Lady Jane didn't seem at all overjoyed to see Barty, but Julia did,
and did not disguise the seeming.

There were eight or ten people there, and they all appeared to know
about him, and all that concerned or belonged to him. It was the old
London world over again, in little! the same tittle-tattle about
well-known people, and nothing else--as if nothing else existed; a
genial, easy-going, good-natured world, that he had so often found
charming for a time, but in which he was never quite happy and had
no proper place of his own, all through that fatal bar-sinister--la
barre de batardise; a world that was his and yet not his, and in
whose midst his position was a false one, but where every one took
him for granted at once as one of _them_, so long as he never
trespassed beyond that sufferance; that there must be no love-making
to lovely young heiresses by the bastard of Antoinette Josselin was
taken for granted also!

[Illustration: "'YOU ASK ME WHY I LOOK SO PALE?'"]

Before Barty had been there half an hour two or three people had
evidently lost their hearts to him in friendship; among them, to Lady
Jane's great discomfiture, the handsome and amiable Graham-Reece, the
cynosure of all female eyes in Riffrath; and when Barty (after very
little pressing by Miss Royce) twanged her guitar and sang little
songs--French and English, funny and sentimental--he became, as he had
so often become in other scenes, the Rigoletto of the company; and
Riffrath was a kingdom in which he might be court jester in ordinary if
he chose, whenever he elected to honor it with his gracious and
facetious musical presence.

So much for his debut in that strange little overgrown busy
village! What must it be like now?

Dr. Hasenclever has been gathered to his fathers long ago, and
nobody that I know of has taken his place. All those new hotels and
lodging-houses and smart shops--what can they have been turned into?
Barracks? prisons? military hospitals and sanatoriums? How dull!

Lady Caroline and Daphne and Barty between them added considerably
to the gayety of Duesseldorf that summer--especially when Royces and
Reeces and Duffs and such like people came there from Riffrath to
lunch, or tea, or dinner, or for walks or dr