Maltina and a nocturne of Rusoff’s. Instead, this divine boy walks up to the piano and plays the “Pied Piper” to us all. Yorkshire brought him up from the country, without a word to anybody, and just shot him at London. He hit. Helen was with Lady Sunningdale,--she always scores somehow,--who gives out openly that she is madly in love with Martin, and makes him imitate her, which he does with such awful fidelity that it is impossible not to believe, if one shuts one’s eyes, that it is not she who is talking. The only question is whether she will poison Sunningdale and insist on marrying Phœbus Apollo, or whether he will say “Retro Sathanas.” It may be taken for granted that Yorkshire will marry the girl. Then, the next night they were all four at the opera in Yorkshire’s box, next the Royal box, and nobody looked at anything else. The girl was dressed in grey, very simple, but quite good. There was just a touch of blue somewhere; no jewels, but that radiant face and that glorious hair! Poor Lady Sunningdale beside her looked like a lobster salad in the highest spirits. But really the boy is the handsomer; and when the opera was over people simply stood on the stairs to see them go out. But the twins were completely unconscious that it was they whom every one was looking at, and came downstairs together, chatting, laughing, and chaffing Lady Sunningdale because she had gone to sleep in the second act of “Siegfried.” My dear, they are simply divine, and we must secure them at once for dinner or something, otherwise it will be too late. The last sentence, whatever in this brief _résumé_ of what London said was false or exaggerated, was certainly borne out by subsequent facts. For London, tired with its spinster ragelessness, rose at them as trout rise in the days of May-fly, and besought their presence, finding them, as is not always the case with its rages, improve on acquaintance. They enjoyed themselves so enormously, and enjoyment is a most infectious disease, of which every hostess prays that her guests may sicken. They danced divinely, with the same childish pleasure, all night. Whatever the entertainment was, they were delighted, and their delight diffused itself through the crowds of which they were the centre. And it was always interesting to have at one’s house the girl from nowhere, who was going to make the match of the season, and the boy from nowhere, who was going to send the world mad with music. The twins, in fact, blazed in the blue; they were the latest discovery, the point at which all telescopes were aimed. And they presumably, like the latest-discovered star, were too busy to be either pleased or embarrassed that everybody was looking at them; they just sang and shone together with all the other lesser stars.