Prince Khristof was a bland, gracious person who had been very fair in youth and early manhood, and still preserved a delicate clear complexion and eyes as blue and serene as Clare Kenilworth’s; his hair was white and silken, his form slender and stately, his carriage elegant; and, alas! there was not a good club in all the world into which he could take his charming presence. When the century was young he had been born the seventh son of a then reigning duke in a small principality of green pasture and glacier-fed stream, and pretty towns like magnified toys, and many square leagues of resinous scented pine forest. The century had seen the principality absorbed, the dukedom mediatized, the towns ruined, and the pine-woods leased to Javish banks. As in many other cases the gain of the empire had been the ruin of the province. Prince Khristof’s eldest brother still abode in his toy-city, and hats were lifted as he passed, but he reigned no more; and Prince Khristof himself, who had been a Colonel of Cuirassiers in his cradle, and at ten years old had seen a sentinel flogged for omitting to carry arms when he had passed, was glad to furnish a mansion for Mr. Massarene, and take forty per cent. from the decorators and dealers, who under his patronage furnished the admirable Clodion and the other rarities, beauties, and luxuries, to the adornment of Harrenden House. He felt it hard that when he had permitted his daughter to marry into finance the misalliance had so little profited himself that he was driven to such expedients. But so it was; and though the descent had been gradual, it had been one which ended in Avernus, and royal and patrician society had shut all its great gates upon him, leaving him only its side entrances and back staircases. The man who could remember when he had been a child in his nurse’s arms, seeing guards carry arms to salute him as he was borne past them suffered acutely from his degradation: but he was beyond all things a philosopher, and thought that fine tobaccos and delicate wines soothe, if they do not cure, many wounds, even when you can only enjoy such things at the expense of your inferiors. “This old beggar ought to know,” thought Brancepeth, occupied with his new idea and to whom Germans meant every nationality from Schleswig-Holstein to Moldavia; and he addressed the newcomer point-blank. “Do you know a Countess Lynar, sir?” “I know a great many Lynars,” replied the Prince. “It is a very general name. Can you add anything more definite?” “She’s the woman whom that Jew fellow, Vanderlin, divorced,” replied Brancepeth. The Prince smiled and coughed. “Olga zu Lynar? I know her--yes. She is my only daughter. Vanderlin is a banker, but he is not a Jew.” Brancepeth grew very red. “I--I--beg you ten thousand pardons,” he muttered. “I didn’t know, you know; I am always blundering.”