Oswald leaned upon his elbow among the pillows. "That was while my father was alive," he said softly, "yes, I have often thought of that, and have thought also that I could explain her conduct. You see my father's foolish fondness for me irritated her, and she suppressed the manifestation of her own affection. Between ourselves, Georges, my mother was wretched in her marriage; her poor heart was always upon the rack, it could no more beat freely and naturally than a man with a rope tight about his neck can sing. I respected my father immensely, but ... well, Georges, look there...." he pointed to a large painting above his bed, the portrait of the countess in the proud splendour of her youthful beauty, "and then, look there...." and he pointed to a white plaster death-mask framed in black velvet hanging on the wall opposite. "As far back as I can remember, my father looked just like that; they were never congenial. And now let me go to sleep, old fellow, good-night!" CHAPTER XI. No, 'congenial' they never had been and never could have been. Although the painting was far from portraying the charm of the Countess Lodrin's beauty in the bloom of youth, the repulsive death-mask opposite did full justice to the deceased count. The face that it represented was almost horse-like in its length; smoothly shaven as that of a monk, with a sharp-pointed nose, little round eyes, a mouth like the slit in a child's money-jug, and seamed with innumerable wrinkles, it resembled one of those bloodless aged heads which abound in pictures by Memmling or Van Eyck. It would be an error to suppose that illness and the final agony had distorted the face before it had been perpetuated in the plaster cast. Count Lodrin had never looked otherwise, he had always looked like a corpse, and Pistasch Kamenz boldly maintained that 'the old gentleman looked his best in his coffin.' Not only Count Pistasch, but everybody else ridiculed Count Lodrin; few men have ever lived who have been more ridiculed. One fact, however, no ridicule could affect--Count Lodrin was a gentleman through and through. That he possessed a tender heart and a sense of duty, which, in spite of the vacillations of a timid temperament, always triumphed in important crises, no one had ever denied who had seen him in any grave emergency,--and that this sense of duty, with a mild admixture of pride of rank, belonged to him more as a gentleman than as a human being, did not detract from his merit. Given over in his youth to the ghostly influence of priestly tutors, he had led a melancholy, misanthropic existence. His delicate constitution made impossible any participation in the manly sports of his equals in rank. Therefore there was developed in him, as in many another recluse, an intense devotion to art; he was indefatigable in sifting and enlarging his collections.