ghter, my
uncle, and an Italian Abbe were the only guests besides. The merchant
was a portly, purple-faced man, who bore his new honours with a curious
mixture of assumed pomposity and natural good-humour. The Abbe was
dwarfish and deformed, lean, sallow, sharp-featured, with bright
bird-like eyes, and a low, liquid voice. He was a political refugee,
dependent for the bread he ate, on the money he received for teaching
languages. He might have been a beggar from the streets; and still my
father would have treated him as the principal guest in the house, for
this all-sufficient reason--he was a direct descendant of one of the
oldest of those famous Roman families whose names are part of the
history of the Civil Wars in Italy.

On the first day, the party assembled for dinner comprised the
merchant's daughter, my mother, an old lady who had once been her
governess, and had always lived with her since her marriage, the new
Lord, the Abbe, my father, and my uncle. When dinner was announced,
the peer advanced in new-blown dignity, to offer his arm as a matter of
course to my mother. My father's pale face flushed crimson in a moment.
He touched the magnificent merchant-lord on the arm, and pointed
significantly, with a low bow, towards the decrepit old lady who had
once been my mother's governess. Then walking to the other end of the
room, where the penniless Abbe was looking over a book in a corner,
he gravely and courteously led the little, deformed, limping
language-master, clad in a long, threadbare, black coat, up to my mother
(whose shoulder the Abbe's head hardly reached), held the door open
for them to pass out first, with his own hand; politely invited the new
nobleman, who stood half-paralysed between confusion and astonishment,
to follow with the tottering old lady on his arm; and then returned to
lead the peer's daughter down to dinner himself. He only resumed his
wonted expression and manner, when he had seen the little Abbe--the
squalid, half-starved representative of mighty barons of the olden
time--seated at the highest place of the table by my mother's side.

It was by such accidental circumstances as these that you discovered how
far he was proud. He never boasted of his ancestors; he never even spoke
of them, except when he was questioned on the subject; but he never
forgot them. They were the very breath of his life; the deities of his
social worship: the family treasures to be held precious beyond all
l