announce that the coach was ready, and Madame
Langai, adjusting her mantilla, went to the playhouse where the actors
were, at least, amusing.

CHAPTER II

A NEW MODE OF DUELLING

Old Lapussa always liked to have under his eye, night and day, some one
or other whom he could plague and worry. Till eight o'clock every
evening he was fully occupied in tormenting the whole family. Then
Madame Langai went to the theatre and Henrietta and the governess had to
sit down at the piano in the large drawing-room till it was time to put
the child to bed. But when Clementina and the domestics had had supper
and there was no longer anybody else with him, the turn of the night
nurse began.

The duties of a night nurse are never very enviable or diverting at the
best of times, yet penal servitude for life was a fate almost preferable
to being the nocturnal guardian of old Demetrius Lapussa. The unhappy
wretch who was burdened with this heavy charge had to sit at Mr.
Lapussa's bed from nine o'clock at night till early the following
morning and read aloud to him all sorts of things the whole time. Old
Demetrius was a very bad sleeper. The whole night long he scarcely slept
more than an hour at a time. His eyes would only close when the droaning
voice of some one reading aloud made his head dizzy, and then he would
doze off for a short time. But at the slightest pause he would
instantly awake and angrily ask the reader why he left off, and urge him
on again.

The reader in question was a student more than fifty years old, who,
time out of mind, had been making a living by fair-copying all sorts of
difficult manuscripts. He was an honest, simple creature who, in his
time, had tried hard to push his way into every conceivable business and
profession without ever succeeding till, at last, when he was well over
fifty, he was fortunate enough to fall in with an editor who happened to
know that Demetrius Lapussa wanted a reader, and recommended the poor
devil for the post. He knew Hungarian, Latin, and Slovack well enough to
mix them all up together; German he could read, though he did not
understand it, but this was not necessary, for he was not expected to
read for his own edification.

This worthy man, then, grew prematurely old in reading, year out year
in, aloud to Mr. Demetrius, one after another, all the German
translations of French novels procurable at Robert Lempel's circulating
library without understanding a single wo