They both possessed fresh, healthy colouring and steadfast gray eyes. Both were virile, real, and would have been unusually handsome except that both had “the Cumberland nose,” which was quite frankly tip-tilted. But, in spite of it, there were many girls in New York who invariably referred to Barry Cumberland as good-looking. And indeed he was, as his father still remained. No two men could have seemed more strangely out of place in this setting. John Cumberland might have passed for an old-fashioned English squire; Barry was as typical a young man of to-day--sane, fit, keen--as one could find anywhere in the English-speaking world. Yet this library more closely resembled one of the Egyptian rooms at the British Museum than the favourite haunt of a prosperous man of affairs. Egypt--unaccountable though it appeared to his friends--was John Cumberland’s hobby; a hobby in which he had sunk a not inconsiderable fortune; in which he had sought, and ultimately found, it would seem, consolation for the loss of Barry’s mother, who had died when Barry was seven years old. To-day the Cumberland Collection ranked as the second finest of its kind in the United States. It was representative of Egyptian civilization in all its phases--save that it contained no mummies. It was not confined to the library, but overflowed into practically every room in the house. Yet nowhere were there any mummies. This was a concession to Aunt Micky, John Cumberland’s sister, who acted as the widower’s housekeeper and hostess. Whereas the loss of his wife had occasioned a wound to John Cumberland’s heart that only time had healed, the loss by his sister of the dissolute Count Colonna had left her a grateful if somewhat embittered woman. The later years of her married life had been years of hidden misery, during which she had realized to the full that, if she had married a title, Colonna had married a dowry. Time, however, had sweetened her even as it had healed her brother. She tasted the strange fruits of our modern orchard with astonishment but without dyspepsia, nevertheless firmly declining to remain under the same roof with a mummy. “This girl on the balcony seems to have made a tremendous impression upon you,” said John Cumberland, keenly watching his son across the library table. “I can never forget her,” Barry declared; for between these two was that rare comradeship which makes secrets unnecessary. “I don’t mean that I have fallen in love at first sight, or anything ridiculous like that! But I have an intense curiosity to know who she is.” “You are quite sure,” his father went on, carefully selecting a cigar, “that the order of events was: the girl and the crash?--not the crash and the girl? You see what I mean, Barry? You have always had an interest in these things--” he waved his cigar vaguely in the direction of the library walls--“which I suppose I have encouraged. You had it in mind to get back here to supper, and so it is just possible----”