He remembered her far back in the days when he sat on her knee and was read to out of fairy books. She had been very pretty then and very happy, and had always talked English with him while every one else spoke French. She had been an Englishwoman, an actress of beauty and promise, who in the zenith of her popularity had made what the world called a fine marriage with a rich Venezuelan, who lived in Paris. The stories of Essex’s doubtful paternity were false. Rose Barry--Rose Essex, on the stage--had been the lawful wife of Antonio Perez, and for ten years was the happy wife as well. They were very prosperous in those days. Barry had gone to the _lycée_ all week and come back every Friday to the beautiful apartment in the Rue de Ponthieu. There were lovely spring Sundays when they drove in the Bois and sometimes got out of the carriage and walked down the sun-flecked _allées_ under the budding trees. And there were even lovelier winter Sundays when they loitered along the boulevards in the crisp, clear cold, with the sky showing leaden gray through the barring of black boughs, and when they came home to a parlor lit with fire and lamplight and had oranges and hard green grapes after dinner. He had loved his pretty mother devotedly in those happy days, but for his saturnine, dark-visaged father he had only a sentiment of uneasy fear. He was twelve, when at his mother’s request he was sent to England to school. He could remember, looking back afterward, that his mother had not been so pretty or so happy then. When he came home from school for vacations she was living at Versailles in a little house that presented a secret, non-committal front to the stony street, but that in the back had a delightful garden full of miniature fountains and summer-houses and grottoes. From the wall he could see the mossy trees and stretches of sun-bathed sward of the Trianon. His father was not always there when he came. One Easter vacation he was not there at all, and when he had asked his mother why, she had burst into sudden, terrible tears that frightened him. During the long summer holidays after that Antonio Perez was only there once over a Sunday. Then he did not come again, and Barry was glad, for he had never cared for his father. He passed delightful days in the Trianon Park with his mother, who was very silent and had gray hair on her temples. She walked beside him with a slow step, dragging her rich lace skirts and with her parasol hanging indolently over her shoulder. It pleased him to see that many people looked at her, but she took no notice of them. When Barry went back to England to school that year he began to feel that he knew what was coming. It came the next vacation. His mother had not dared to tell him by letter. Her husband had deserted her and disappeared, leaving her with a few thousand francs in the bank, and not a friend.