But Connie also was playing an important part. Both Lord and Lady Risborough had possessed devoted friends in Paris, and Connie had made others of her own among the young folk with whom she had danced and flirted and talked, when at eighteen she had spent a happy spring with her parents in the Avenue Marceau. She had set these playfellows of hers to work, and with most brilliant success. Otto’s story as told by her vivacious letters had gone the round. No woman of twice her age could have told it more adroitly. Otto appeared as the victim of an unfortunate accident in a College frolic; Falloden as the guardian friend; herself, as his lieutenant. It touched the romantic sense, the generous heart of musical Paris. There were many who remembered Otto’s father and mother and the musical promise of the fair-haired boy. The Polish colony in Paris, a survival from the tragic days of Poland’s exodus under the revolutionary skies of the thirties and the sixties, had been appealed to, and both Polish and French musicians were already in communication with Chaumart, and producing records under his direction. The young Polish marvel of the day—Paderewski—had been drawn in, and his renderings of Chopin’s finest work were to provide the bulk of the rolls. Connie’s dear old Polish teacher, himself a composer, was at work on a grouping of folk-songs from Poland and Lithuania—the most characteristic utterance of a martyred people. ‘They are songs, _chère petite_,’ wrote the old man—‘of revolt, of exile, and of death. There is no other folk-song like them in the world, just as there is no history in the world like Poland’s. Your poor friend knows them all—has known them all from his childhood. They will speak to him of his torn country. He will hear in them the cry of the White Eagle—the White Eagle of Poland—as she soars wounded and bleeding over the southern plains, or sinks dying into the marshes and forests of Lithuania. It is in these songs, _chère Miladi_, that we Poles listen to the very heart-beats of our outraged country. Our songs—our music—our poets—our memories:—as a nation that is all we have—except the faith in us that never dies. _Hinc surrectura!_ Yes, she shall rise again, our Poland! Our hope is in God, and in the human heart, the human conscience, that He has made. Comfort your friend. He has lost much, poor boy!—but he has still ears to hear, a brain, an imagination to conceive. Let him work still for music and for Poland,—they will some day reward him!’ And as a last contribution, a young French pianist, rising rapidly into fame both as a virtuoso and a composer, was writing specially a series of variations on the lovely theme of the ‘Heynal’—that traditional horn-song, played every hour in the ears of Cracow, from the tower of Panna Marya—of which Otto had spoken to Falloden.