ieces, and we have eight of them left! Oh, quite a fortune! It will
keep us until I can sell the 'Apache.' I shall take it to a picture
dealer's to-morrow."

Countess Shulski's heart sank. She knew so well of old how long eight
twenty-franc pieces would be likely to last! In spite of Mirko's care
and watching of his father that gentleman was capable of giving one of
them to a beggar if the beggar's face and story touched him, and any of
the others could go in a present to Mirko or herself--to be pawned
later, when necessity called. The case was hopeless as far as money was
concerned with Count Sykypri.

Her own meager income, derived from the dead Shulski, was always
forestalled for the wants of the family--the little brother whom she had
promised her dead and adored mother never to desert.

For when the beautiful wife of Maurice Grey, the misanthropic and
eccentric Englishman who lived in a castle near Prague, ran off with
Count Mimo Sykypri, her daughter, then aged thirteen, had run with her,
and the pair had been wiped off the list of the family. And Maurice
Grey, after cursing them both and making a will depriving them of
everything, shut himself up in his castle, and steadily drank himself to
death in less than a year. And the brother of the beautiful Mrs. Grey,
Francis Markrute, never forgave her either. He refused to receive her or
hear news of her, even after poor little Mirko was born and she married
Count Sykypri.

For on the father's side, the Markrute brother and sister were of very
noble lineage; even with his bar sinister the financier could not brook
the disgrace of Elinka. He had loved her so--the one soft side of his
adamantine character. Her disgrace, it seemed, had frozen all the
tenderness in his nature.

Countess Shulski was silent for a few moments, while both Mimo and Mirko
watched her face anxiously. She had thrown back her veil.

"And supposing you do not sell the 'Apache,' Mimo? Your own money does
not come in until Christmas; mine is all gone until January, and it is
the cold winter approaching--and cold is not good for Mirko. What then?"

Count Sykypri moved uneasily. A tragic look grew in his handsome face;
his face that was a mirror of all passing emotions; his face that had
been able to express love and romance, devotion and tenderness, to wile
a bird from off a tree or love from the heart of any woman. And even
though Zara Shulski knew of just how little value was anything he said