"The girl's coming out in three days' time. They're giving a ball in Portland Place for her. Nobody knows much about her. She's been educated abroad, and always kept very close when she's here. I shouldn't think the old Duchess loves her much. She loved the girl's father, but he married a Russian actress, bolted to Russia with her, and the old lady never forgave him. He and the actress were both killed in a Petersburg fire, and the child was sent home--only tiny then----" "Ah! that explains the foreign air she had. She didn't look as though she loved her aunt very much either." "No--don't suppose she does. But that's not it--that's not it." They had arrived now at the top of Bond Street, and they paused for a moment to allow the Oxford Street traffic to sweep past them. It was an hour of stir and clatter--hansoms, carts, lumbering omnibuses, bicycles, all were hurled along as though by some impatient hand, and the evening light crept higher and higher along the walls of the street, leaving grey-purple shadows beneath it. They crossed over, and were instantly in a dim, golden, voiceless square. It was as though a door had been closed. Brun still held Arkwright's arm. "Now we can talk--no noise. Francis Breton has come back." To Arkwright this name, unfortunately, conveyed nothing. "You don't know?" Brun was disappointed. "Never heard of him." "Fancy that. World of wonders; what have you been doing with your time? He is the Duchess's grandson, son of the beautiful, the wonderful Iris Beaminster, who eloped with Kit Breton thirty years ago. I believe the old Duchess pursued her relentlessly until the end. They were married only a few years and then Iris Breton committed suicide. Kit Breton beat her and was always drunk; an absolute rascal. There was one boy, and he wandered about Europe with his father until he was twenty or so. Then Kit Breton died, and the boy came home. Revenge on his grandmother was his one idea. He was taken up by her enemies, of whom she always had a goodly store, and they might have made something out of him, if he hadn't developed his father's habits and finally been mixed up in some gambling scandal, and forced to leave the country. "You can imagine what all this was to the Beaminsters--the great immaculate Beaminsters--you can picture the Duchess.... He went and saw her once ... but that's another story. Well, abroad he went, and abroad he stayed--just now, coming out of the Gallery, I saw him----" "You are sure?" "Positive. There could be no mistake. He's just the same, a trifle tireder, a trifle lower down--but the same, oh yes." It was when Brun was most excited that he was unmistakably the foreigner. Now little exclamations that escaped him revealed him. As a rule in England he was more English than the English.