rubbish, until there is no room left for their honest every-day clothes. Throw it away, and the sooner the better!"

"What has once been dear to me is forever sacred in my eyes," said the captain, solemnly.

"Yes, and consequently you drag about with you through life such a heap of old, dusty, battered illusions that I really cannot see where you find the strength to hold fast to one healthy vital sensation. Bah! painful as it is, one must bury one's dead in time!"

"I prefer to embalm mine," the captain rejoined, with dignity.

"Let me congratulate you upon your collection of mummies," said his wife.

"You have no capacity for veneration," the captain declared.

"Because I disapprove of whining ad infinitum as homage to a vanished enthusiasm,--ridiculous!" said Katrine.

"Don't quarrel, my doves!" Stasy entreated, clasping her hands after a child-like fashion.

"We have no idea of doing so," the mistress of the house replied, good-humouredly. "We never quarrel. Our complaint is a chronic difference of opinion. What were we really talking about?"

"About illusions," remarked Baron Rohritz.

"Oh, that was merely a side-issue,--only an after-piece," said Frau von Leskjewitsch, bethinking herself. "What was the starting-point of our discussion?--Oh, yes: we were speaking of my little niece."

"Perhaps you can show us a photograph of her," said Anastasia.

"Yes, yes." And Frau von Leskjewitsch began an eager search in a small gilt cottage which had once been a bonbonnière and now served as a receptacle for photographs. In vain. Upon a closer examination several of the photographs were found to be missing. Little Freddy confessed with a repentant face that he had cut them up to make winders for twine. His mother laughed, kissed his sleepy, troubled eyes, and sent him to bed. Thus Baron Rohritz was left to draw from fancy a possible likeness of Stella Meineck.

CHAPTER II.

BARON ROHRITZ.

Stasy had vented so much malice upon Stella that Rohritz had involuntarily begun to think well of her. After he had retired, in the watches of the night, and was trying in vain to be interested in a volume of Tauchnitz, his thoughts were still busied with her. "Poor thing," he reflected, "there must be something attractive about her, or Les and his wife would not be so devoted to her. And, after all, what did that venomous old maid's accusations amount to?--that she has an antipathy for artillery-officers,"--Rohritz as a former cavalry-man shrugged his shoulders indulgently at this weakness,--"and that she wants to go upon the stage. That, to be sure, is bad. I know nothing in the world more repulsive than girls of what are called the better classes who are studying for the stage."

And Rohritz recalled a certain officer's daughter whom he had once met at an evening entertainment, and who in proof of her distinguished talent had declaimed various 'selections.' He had been quite unable to detect her talent, and had spoken of her contemptuously as an hysterical tree-frog. The appellation had met with acceptance and had been frequently repeated.

The remembrance of the officer's bony daughter lay heavy on his soul. "Yes, if Stella should remind me in the least of that hysterical tree-frog, I really could not stay here much longer," he thought, with a shudder. "And in any case I cannot but regret these last pleasant days. That old dandy and the faded beauty were bad enough, but they could be ignored; while a young girl--and a relative, too, of the family---- Pshaw! at all events I can take my leave."

With which he put out his candle and went to bed.

What it was that was dear to him in the sleepy and very uninteresting life at Erlach Court it would be difficult to say. Perhaps he prized it as chiming in so admirably with the precious ennui which he had brought home from America ten years previously, and which had since been his inseparable companion. It was such a finished, elegant ennui; it never yawned and looked about for amusement, never in fact felt the least desire for it, but looked down in self-satisfied superiority upon those childish mortals who were actually capable of being irritated or entertained upon this old exhausted globe.

He was proud of this kind of moral ossification, which was gradually paralyzing all his really noble qualities.

"'Tis a pity!" said Leskjewitsch, whose youth was still warm in his veins, and who declared that he had never been bored for half an hour in his life, except upon a pitch-dark night in winter at some lonely outpost when he had been delayed on the march; and although the honest captain was a demi-savage and "still in roundabouts," we cannot help repeating his words with reference to Rohritz, "'Tis a pity!"

Yes, a pity! Who that saw Edgar von Rohritz--his mother had bestowed upon him his melodramatic name in a fit of enthusiasm for Walter Scott and Donizetti,--who that saw him to-day could believe that in his youth, under a thin disguise of aristocratic nonchalance, he was far more sentimentally inclined than his former comrade Leskjewitsch? But sentiment had fared ill with him. After having overcome, not without a hard struggle, the pain of a very bitter disappointment, his demands upon existence were of the most moderate description, and this partly to spare himself useless pain and partly from caution lest he should make himself ridiculous. He kept his heart closely shut; and if at times sentiment, now fallen into disgrace with him, softly appealed to it, entreating admission, he refused to listen. He was no longer at home for sentiment.

About twenty years since he had begun his military career in the same regiment of dragoons with Jack Leskjewitsch, and when hardly five-and-twenty he had left the service and travelled round the world, perhaps because change of air is as beneficial for diseases of the heart as for other maladies.

For years now he had made his home in Grätz, whence he took frequent flights to Vienna. He was but moderately addicted to society, so called. He never danced; at balls he played whist, and dryly criticised the figures and the toilettes of the dancers. He had the reputation of being a woman-hater, and accordingly all the young married women thought him excessively interesting. He was held to be one of the best matches in Grätz, wherefore he was exposed to persecution by all mothers blest with marriageable daughters.

Wearied of this varied homage, he had gradually withdrawn from society, and had even relinquished his game of Boston, when one day a report was circulated that he had suddenly lost almost all his property through the negligence of an agent. All that was left him--so it was said--was a mere pittance. Since he never contradicted this report, it was thought to be confirmed. The mothers of marriageable daughters discovered that he had a disagreeable disposition, and that it would be very difficult to live with him. One week after this sad report had been in circulation, he observed with a peculiar smile that during this space of time he had received at least half a dozen fewer invitations to dinners and balls than usual. Shortly afterwards meeting a friend in the street who offered him his sincere condolence, he replied, with a twirl of his moustache,--

"Do not, trouble yourself about me: I assure you that it is sometimes very comfortable to be poor!"

The news of his sadly-altered