be false. Among the latter
was Usselex himself. His own account of his antecedents was to the
effect that his father was a Cornishman, his mother a Swiss governess,
and that he had been brought up by the latter in Bale, from which city
he had at an early age set out to make his fortune. Whether or not this
statement was exact is a matter of minor moment. In any event,
supposing for argument's sake that he had more names than are necessary,
has not Vishnu a thousand? And as for debts, did not Caesar owe a hundred
million sesterces? But however true or untrue his own account of himself
may have been, certain it was that he spoke three languages with the
same accent, and that a decennary or so after landing at Castle Garden
his name was familiar to everyone connected with banks and banking.

At the time contemporaneous to the episodes with which these pages have
to deal John Usselex had reached that age in which men begin to take an
interest in hair restorers. In his face was the pallor of a plastercast,
his features were correct and coercive, in person he was about the
average height, slim and well-preserved. He carried glasses rimmed with
tortoise-shell. He wore a beard cut fan-shape and a moustache with
drooping ends. Both were gray. In moments of displeasure he smiled, but
behind the glasses no merriment was discernible; when they were removed
his eyes glowed luminous and shrewd, and in them was a glitter that
suggested a reflection caught from the handling and glare of gold. In
the financial acceptation of the term he was good; he was at the head of
a house that possessed the confidence of the Street, his foreign
correspondents were of the best, but in the inner circles of New York
life he was as unknown as Ischwanbrat.

Miss Menemon, on the other hand, had no foreign correspondents, but in
the circles alluded to she was thoroughly at home. Her father, Mr.
Petrus Menemon, was not accounted rich, but he came of excellent stock,
and her mother, long since deceased, had been an Imryck. Now, to be an
Imryck, to say nothing of being a Menemon, is to be Somebody. Miss
Menemon, moreover, was not quite twenty-two years of age. To nine people
out of ten she represented little else than the result of the union of
an Imryck and a Menemon; but to the tenth, particularly when the tenth
happened to be a man, she was as attractive a girl as New York could
produce. As a child she had not been noticeably pretty, but when, as
the phr