Anyhow, Lady Caroline loved to hear all Barty had to say of his gay life among the beauty, rank, and fashion of Blankenberghe. She was very civil to the handsome Irish Madame de Clèves, _née_ O'Brien, and listened politely to the family history of the O'Briens and that of the de Clèveses too: and learnt, without indecent surprise, or any emotion of any kind whatever, what she had never heard before--namely, that in the early part of the twelfth century a Rohan de Whitby had married an O'Brien of Ballywrotte; and other prehistoric facts of equal probability and importance. She didn't believe much in people's twelfth--century reminiscences; she didn't even believe in those of her own family, who didn't believe in them either, or trouble about them in the least; and I dare say they were quite right. Anyhow, when people solemnly talked about such things it made her rather sorry. But she bore up for Barty's sake, and the resigned, half-humorous courtesy with which she assented to these fables was really more humiliating to a sensitive, haughty soul than any mere supercilious disdain; not that she ever wished to humiliate, but she was easily bored, and thought that kind of conversation vulgar, futile, and rather grotesque. Indeed, she grew quite fond of Madame de Clèves and the splendid young dragoon, and the sweet little black-haired daughter with lovely blue eyes, who sang so charmingly. For they were singularly charming people in every way, the de Clèveses; and that's a way Irish people often have--as well as of being proud of their ancient blood. There is no more innocent weakness. I have it very strongly--moi qui vous parle--on the maternal side. My mother was a Blake of Derrydown, a fact that nobody would have known unless she now and then accidentally happened to mention it herself, or else my father did. And so I take the opportunity of slipping it in here--just out of filial piety! So the late autumn of that year found Barty and his aunt at Malines, or Mechelen, as it calls itself in its native tongue. They had comfortable lodgings of extraordinary cheapness in one of the dullest streets of that most picturesque but dead-alive little town, where the grass grew so thick between the paving-stones here and there that the brewers' dray-horses might have browsed in the "Grand Brul"--a magnificent but generally deserted thoroughfare leading from the railway station to the Place d'Armes, where rose still unfinished the colossal tower of one of the oldest and finest cathedrals in the world, whose chimes wafted themselves every half-quarter of an hour across the dreamy flats for miles and miles, according to the wind, that one might realize how slow was the flight of time in that particular part of King Leopold's dominions. "'And from a tall tower in the town Death looks gigantically down!'"