overturned and smashed!"

Peter Sherringham and Biddy Dormer listened with attention to this
history, and the girl testified to the interest with which she had
followed it by saying when Mr. Nash had ceased speaking: "A Jewish
stockbroker, a dealer in curiosities: what an odd person to marry--for a
person who was well born! I daresay he was a German."

"His name must have been simply Roth, and the poor lady, to smarten it
up, has put in another _o_," Sherringham ingeniously suggested.

"You're both very clever," said Gabriel, "and Rudolf Roth, as I happen
to know, was indeed the designation of Maud Vavasour's papa. But so far
as the question of derogation goes one might as well drown as
starve--for what connexion is _not_ a misalliance when one happens to
have the unaccommodating, the crushing honour of being a Neville-Nugent
of Castle Nugent? That's the high lineage of Maud's mamma. I seem to
have heard it mentioned that Rudolf Roth was very versatile and, like
most of his species, not unacquainted with the practice of music. He had
been employed to teach the harmonium to Miss Neville-Nugent and she had
profited by his lessons. If his daughter's like him--and she's not like
her mother--he was darkly and dangerously handsome. So I venture rapidly
to reconstruct the situation."

A silence, for the moment, had fallen on Lady Agnes and her other two
children, so that Mr. Nash, with his universal urbanity, practically
addressed these last remarks to them as well as to his other auditors.
Lady Agnes looked as if she wondered whom he was talking about, and
having caught the name of a noble residence she inquired: "Castle
Nugent--where in the world's that?"

"It's a domain of immeasurable extent and almost inconceivable
splendour, but I fear not to be found in any prosaic earthly geography!"
Lady Agnes rested her eyes on the tablecloth as if she weren't sure a
liberty had not been taken with her, or at least with her "order," and
while Mr. Nash continued to abound in descriptive suppositions--"It must
be on the banks of the Manzanares or the Guadalquivir"--Peter
Sherringham, whose imagination had seemingly been kindled by the sketch
of Miriam Rooth, took up the argument and reminded him that he had a
short time before assigned a low place to the dramatic art and had not
yet answered the question as to whether he believed in the theatre.
Which gave the speaker a further chance. "I don't know that I understand
your question