“I am afraid his family doesn’t much appreciate the connection. I have never heard of St. Maur’s being asked to----” He named the ducal seat to which St. Maur was in the habit of referring as if it had been his childhood’s home. “I am a foreigner; I do not understand these things,” said the Frenchman. “But I have met this man in your flat, and I have heard you introduce him to others as a relative of the Duke’s.” The charge was a true one, and Egerton winced. The Count pursued pitilessly: “Besides, it is a very common thing in this country, is it not, for the elder branch to ignore the existence of the younger ones?” This was hitting Vane on a raw place. The abiding sorrow of the brothers’ lives was that their titled relative, a vulgar Philistine immersed in field-sports and such coarse pleasures, had never taken the slightest notice of a cousinship which should have been his pride. Further discussion was prevented by the sound of wheels outside. Des Louvres instantly excused himself to his guests, and went out to the front-door to receive his royal guest with fitting honour. The personage who now alighted from a hansom-cab, and walked up the steps to where the Count stood waiting with bowed head, was a tall, swarthy young man of a rather heavy type of face, and sombre eyes. The face and figure were not lacking in distinction, though they could scarcely be called handsome. Their chief defect, however, was an air of listlessness and lifelessness, as though the unfortunate bearer of a great name had been crushed beneath its weight from his birth. Life had, in fact, had nothing to offer Don Juan that he could accept as compensation for what his forefathers had possessed and lost. The misery of opposition, the misery of exile, and the misery of ruin had accumulated their shadows over his cradle. The secret of earthly happiness is to have found the work we are best fitted for, and to be doing it with all our might. The only work for which this young man had been formed by birth or circumstance was to saunter in black velvet beneath the shade of cedar-trees, in a park wide as a province, with a falcon on his wrist, and silk-clad favourites on each side of him, while behind a curtain a queen and a confessor played chess for his kingdom. It was thus that his ancestors had discharged their office for two centuries; it was thus that he himself would have discharged it had the kingdom been still to lose. It is unhappiness to gaze too long at the unattainable. The memory of the past had been to Don Juan what a glimpse of London is sometimes to a savage, unfitting him to take up his daily task, and rendering his life a dull ache of longings for the remote and unachieved. In understudying the great part he was never likely to play he had missed the chance of success in some humbler rôle. The poor Royal Highness mounted the steps of Chestnut-Tree House and greeted Des Louvres in a tone of intimacy.