Mr. Rebell remained silent for some moments, and then: "Not even to please you," he said, "can I bring myself to receive them. But I admit the force of what you said just now. Therefore, if you care to do so, stay--stay and make what excuse for my absence seems good to you. Bosworth will know the reason well enough, unless he's more lost to a sense of decency than I take him to be. But Bar--poor dear Bar," a note of unwilling tenderness crept into his cold voice, "will doubtless believe you if you tell her, what indeed is true enough, that I have an important engagement to-day with Daman, and that, if she cares to see me, I will come and see her before she leaves Paris----" The speaker went to the window and opened it. He bent down and touched Barbara's forehead with his dry lips. "I trust," he said in his thin voice, "that you will have a pleasant birthday. I will bring you back a box of chocolates from Marquis'," and then, without waiting to hear the child's murmured thanks, he turned on his heel and was gone. Barbara did not see her father again till the next morning. * * * * * It was early afternoon, and the fair-haired Englishwoman and her little dark, eager-eyed daughter were sitting out on the rose-wreathed balcony of the Villa d'Arcole. Mrs. Rebell was very silent. She was longing for, and yet dreading, the coming meeting with one she had not seen since they had parted, with tears, at Dover, eight long years before. Her restlessness affected the child, the more so that Barbara knew that her marraine, that is to say in English, her godmother, the source of many beautiful gifts, was at last coming to see them, and in her short life the rare coming of a visitor had always been an event. Below the balcony, across the tiny formal garden now bright with flowers, the broad sanded roadway stretching between the Villa d'Arcole and the high cool screen formed by the forest trees, was flecked with gay groups of children and their be-ribboned nurses. St. Germains was beginning to awake from its noonday torpor, and leisurely walkers, elegant women whose crinolines produced a curious giant blossom-like effect, elderly bourgeois dressed in rather fantastic summer garb, officers in brilliant uniforms--for in those days Imperial France was a land of brilliancy and of uniforms--were already making their way to the Terrace, ever the centre of the town's life and gossip. Suddenly there came on Barbara's listening ears a sound of wheels, of sharply ringing hoofs, of musical jingling of harness bells. Several of the strollers below stayed their footsteps, and a moment later Mrs. Rebell became aware that before the iron-wrought gilt gates of the villa there had drawn up the prettiest and most fantastic of equipages, while to the child's eager eyes it seemed as if Cinderella's fairy chariot stood below!