as thrown up
and a net was stretched across the opening. I saw nobody, but I heard,
in the room, first a shrill whistling and singing of birds, then the
deep ringing voice which Marian's description had made familiar to me.
"Come out on my little finger, my pret-pret-pretties!" cried the voice.
"Come out and hop upstairs! One, two, three--and up! Three, two,
one--and down! One, two, three--twit-twit-twit-tweet!" The Count was
exercising his canaries as he used to exercise them in Marian's time at
Blackwater Park.

I waited a little while, and the singing and the whistling ceased.
"Come, kiss me, my pretties!" said the deep voice. There was a
responsive twittering and chirping--a low, oily laugh--a silence of a
minute or so, and then I heard the opening of the house door. I turned
and retraced my steps. The magnificent melody of the Prayer in
Rossini's Moses, sung in a sonorous bass voice, rose grandly through
the suburban silence of the place. The front garden gate opened and
closed. The Count had come out.

He crossed the road and walked towards the western boundary of the
Regent's Park. I kept on my own side of the way, a little behind him,
and walked in that direction also.

Marian had prepared me for his high stature, his monstrous corpulence,
and his ostentatious mourning garments, but not for the horrible
freshness and cheerfulness and vitality of the man. He carried his
sixty years as if they had been fewer than forty. He sauntered along,
wearing his hat a little on one side, with a light jaunty step,
swinging his big stick, humming to himself, looking up from time to
time at the houses and gardens on either side of him with superb,
smiling patronage. If a stranger had been told that the whole
neighbourhood belonged to him, that stranger would not have been
surprised to hear it. He never looked back, he paid no apparent
attention to me, no apparent attention to any one who passed him on his
own side of the road, except now and then, when he smiled and smirked,
with an easy paternal good humour, at the nursery-maids and the
children whom he met. In this way he led me on, till we reached a
colony of shops outside the western terraces of the Park.

Here he stopped at a pastrycook's, went in (probably to give an order),
and came out again immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was
grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled
monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Cou