en
the high green walls. She is dressed in some soft cream-colored stuff
with quantities of lace. She carries a sunshade of the same hue. She has
a tall cane in her other hand. On either side of her are the Ladies
Alexandra and Hermione, and before her gambols in his white sailor
clothes, with his blue silk stockings and his silver-buckled shoes, the
Babe.

"Decidedly the Sabaroff," says Usk. "Won't you come and speak to her?"

"With pleasure," says Brandolin. "Even if the Babe brains me with the
cane!"

He looks very well as he walks bareheaded over the grass and along the
green alley; he wears a loose brown velvet coat admirably made, and
brown breeches and stockings; his legs are as well made as his coat; the
sun shines on his curling hair; there is a _degage_, picturesque,
debonair, yet distinguished look about him, which pleases the eyes of
Xenia Sabaroff, as they watch him draw near.

"Who is that person with your father?" she asks. The children tell her,
all speaking at once.

She recognizes the name; she has heard of him often in the world, and
has read those books which praise solitude and a dinner of herbs. "I
doubt his having been alone very long, however," she reflects, as she
looks at him. A certain unlikeness in him to Englishmen in general, some
women who are fond of him fancifully trace to the fact that the first
Brandolin was a Venetian, who fled for his life from the Republic, and
made himself conspicuous and acceptable for his talents alike as a
lutist and a swordsman at the court of Henry the Second. "It can't
count, it's so very far away," he himself objects; but perhaps it does
count. Of all things ineffaceable, the marks of race are the most
indelible.

The Venetian Brandolin married the daughter of a Norman knight, and his
descendants became affectionate sons of England, and held their lands of
St. Hubert's Lea safely under the wars of the Roses, of the
Commonwealth, and of the Jacobites. They were always noticeable for
scholarly habits and artistic tastes, and in the time of George the
Second the Lord Brandolin of the period did much to enrich his family
mansion and diminish the family fortunes by his importations of Italian
sculptures and pictures and his patronage of Italian musicians. The
house at St. Hubert's Lea is very beautiful, but it requires much more
to keep it up than the present owner possesses. He is often urged to let
it, but he scouts the idea. "You might as well ask me t