"It must have gone hard with the poor fellow, God rest his soul! The night after the contract had been signed he died of apoplexy." "Good Heavens!" murmured Truyn, pacing restlessly to and fro. "Good Heavens!" "And there is another interesting piece of news," Georges went on. "Well?" "Fritz--do you remember him?" "Certainly. The only Malzin now left, a very amiable lad who unfortunately made an impossible marriage." "Yes, he married an actress, and just at the time when every one else was tired of ...." "Georges!" exclaimed Oswald frowning and glancing towards Gabrielle. He was evidently of the opinion that such things should not be mentioned in the presence of young girls. "Hm--hm," muttered Georges, "and he has accepted the post of Capriani's private secretary." "Frightful!" exclaimed Oswald. "He must have become morally corrupt to some degree, before he could make up his mind to submit to such a humiliation," interposed Truyn indignantly. "Poor devil!" said Oswald. "What would you have?" the philosophic Georges remarked and hummed ironically the air of '_Garde la reine_.' "_Ce n'est pas toujours les memes qui ont l'assiette au beurre_. I tell you it is all up with us." All preserved a melancholy silence for a while, then Truyn favoured the party with a few grand political aphorisms, and Oswald at last said to himself perfectly calmly, and as if impromptu, "Gabrielle and Capriani's son!" The melancholy mood vanished and they talked and laughed so that there was a sound as of merry bells through the silence of the night. CHAPTER III. Zoe Melkweyser was an Austrian and a distant relative of Truyn's. Very well-born, but in very narrow pecuniary circumstances, she had grown up on her widowed father's heavily-mortgaged estate, condemned through want of means to a continued residence there, restless as was the temperament with which nature had endowed her. As a school-girl she had no greater pleasure than imaginary journeys from place to place upon the map, and one day she confided to her governess, Mrs. Sidney, under the seal of secrecy, that she would consent to marry any man, even were he a negro, who would promise to indulge her restlessness and allow her to travel to her heart's content. It was no negro, however, but a banker from Brussels, who finally fulfilled her requirements. She met him at a watering-place, whither she had gone under the chaperonage of a wealthy and compassionate relative. In spite of her thirst for travel she could hardly have made up her mind to marry an Austrian banker, but a Belgian Cr[oe]sus was quite a different affair in her opinion. All the objections and remonstrances of her aristocratic connections in Austria upon her return thither betrothed, she cut short with, "What would you have? Of course I never should have met him here, but he was received at court in Brussels."