The château in which some of the banished descendants of Louis the Great had set up their household gods, in the shape of a most exquisite collection of artistic treasures, was only a mile or so distant from Mr. Hillary’s house. It was an old red-brick mansion like the Cedars; and, indeed, the banks of the Thames seem specially rich in red-brick mansions of the Georgian period. It was a noble old house, and had extended itself of late years on either side, until it was almost palatial of aspect. It was a very pretty house, filled to overflowing with art-treasures, about almost every one of which there hung a history as interesting as the object itself. Royalty, the banished royalty of France, inhabited that simple suburban mansion; and on the smooth lawn, where the pennants were flying and the band playing, a quiet-looking gentleman moved about among the visitors, whose grave and noble face was the exact reproduction of another face, to be seen in stained marble under a glass case within the mansion; the face of a gentleman who, in the course of an adventurous career, won some little distinction under the style and title of Henry IV., King of France and Navarre. It was almost like going back into the past for an hour or so to lounge on that sunny lawn at Twickenham, so strange yet so familiar were some of the names that were heard on the lips of the crowd. There was a mournful kind of interest in those historic titles; and the aspect of the pretty flower-festooned marquees, where elegant women were charging fabulous prices for all manner of absurdities in the way of Berlin wool, recalled the image of tented plains and fields of cloth-of-gold, in the days when the sons of St. Louis had other and more high-sounding business in this world than such gentle works of charity as occupied them pleasantly enough to-day. Maude Hillary was in her glory in the gardens of the Château de Bourbon. She had plenty of ready money, for once in a way; a crisp little bundle of five-pound notes, which her father had brought from the City on the previous evening; and she distributed her wealth freely among the fashionable stall-keepers, loading herself and her attendant cavaliers with wax dolls and Berlin-wool work, reticules, antimacassars, painted fire-screens, bottles of toilet vinegar, and feather flowers. She knew a great many people, and she was so bright and animated, and happy-looking, that people who were utter strangers to her watched her with a feeling of interest, and asked one another who she was. She was standing amidst a group of aristocratic acquaintance upon the terrace overlooking the river, when she cried out that her papa had arrived, and ran away to meet him, leaving Julia Desmond and the two young men behind her.