"Well, Hench," said Spruce, when this speech was ended, "now you know. Are you not heart-broken?" "No!" retorted Hench sharply. "Nor am I defeated. Zara will decide." "She will decide what I order her to decide!" cried Madame Alpenny furiously. "And my daughter is not for you, Mr. Hench!" "I should prefer to discuss that question privately," said the young man in a stiff, haughty way; "there is no need for Mr. Spruce to be present." "Oh, don't say that," chimed in the Nut reproachfully; "I may be able to help you, old fellow. You don't go the right way to work." "It's my own way," snapped Hench restlessly, and objecting to interference. "Then it's the wrong way," snapped Spruce in his turn. "Remember that Madame Alpenny thinks you are a mystery. Use that to help you." "In what way?" Hench opened his brown eyes. "Mysterious persons are always interesting, and if Madame here finds that you may turn out to be some one great, who knows but what she may change her mind?" "Are you something great?" asked the lady, addressing Hench quickly. "No. I am nobody, and will remain nobody. Why should you think that I am, what you call, a mystery?" "It is hard to say," she answered dreamily and staring hard at him. "I have seen eyes like yours somewhere. They are connected with a story--a kind of family mystery. But I can't remember to whom those eyes belonged." "Perhaps you have met our friend here before," suggested the Nut eagerly. "No!" said Madame positively, and Hench also shook his head. "I met him here for the first time. The person who had eyes like him I met--or I fancy I met--some twenty years ago. But it is all vague and uncertain. Yet I feel that the story I allude to is here"--she touched her forehead--"a mere word will bring it back to my memory." "Then let us try and find the magic word," cried the irrepressible Spruce. "I am desperately curious myself to fathom a mystery which the person concerned in it does not guess." "Meaning me," said Hench tartly. "You are talking rubbish." "Sense, sense, common-sense. When the mystery is discovered you may be able to marry Mademoiselle Zara." "There is no mystery about me, I tell you." "Well, I am not so sure of that," remarked the little man, in spite of his friend's frown. "You don't know anything about your family, as you admitted to me. Yet I dare swear that those papers you are to inspect at your lawyers' in a few weeks, when you arrive at the age of twenty-five, may contain a history which will astonish you." "Papers at your lawyers'," echoed Madame Alpenny, looking excited; "is that so?" Hench reluctantly admitted that such was the case. "But I don't suppose that anything I don't know will come to my knowledge." "Who knows," observed the old lady thoughtfully. "Mr. Spruce is right. This hint of mystery interests me in you and makes me more ready to entertain your proposal to marry Zara. If you turned out to be wealthy----" "I never will, I tell you," insisted Hench crossly.