the listener from a happy baby into a thoughtful, over-sensitive little girl. Barbara had felt a wild revolt and indignation in the knowledge that her parents were being thus discussed—that her father should be described as "sinister," her mother pitied. Again and again she repeated to herself the words that she had heard: their meaning had stamped itself on her mind. Could her father have indeed killed a man in a duel? To Barbara the thought was at once horrible and fascinating, and she brooded over it, turning the idea this way and that: the constant companionship of her mother—for Mrs. Rebell rarely left her alone with their French servants—having unconsciously taught her a deep and almost secretive reserve.

Were her father guilty of what these French ladies suspected, then—or so thought Barbara—his subdued, melancholy air was indeed natural, as also his apparent dislike of meeting fellow countrymen and countrywomen, for he and his wife always markedly avoided any English visitors to St. Germains. Now and again Mr. Rebell would spend a long day in Paris, returning laden with a large parcel of books, the latest English novels for his wife, more serious volumes for his own perusal; but both Mrs. Rebell and Barbara had learnt to dread these expeditions, for they brought with them sad after-days of silent depression and restlessness which left their effect on the wife long after the traveller himself had regained his usual sombre quietude of manner.

Barbara was secretly proud of the fact that her father was so extremely unlike, both in manner and in appearance, the Frenchmen who now formed his only acquaintances. This was perhaps owing in a measure to the periodical visit of his London tailor, for Richard Rebell had retained amid his misfortunes—and he was fond of telling himself that no living man had been so unfortunate—the one-time dandy's fastidiousness about his dress. The foreigners with whom he was unwillingly brought in contact sometimes speculated as to the mysterious Englishman's probable age; his hair was already grey, his pale, coldly impassive face had none of the healthy tints of youth, yet he was still upright and vigorous, and possessed to a singular degree what the French value above all things, distinction of appearance. As a matter of fact Mr. Rebell was only some twelve years older than his still girlish-looking wife; but certain terrible events seemed to have had a petrifying effect both on his mind and on his appearance, intensified by the fact that both he and Mrs. Rebell tacitly chose to live as if in a world of half-lights and neutral tints, rarely indeed alluding to the past, instinctively avoiding any topic which could cause them emotion.

Every age,—it might be said with truth every decade,—has its ideal of feminine beauty; and the man who had been the Richard Rebell of the London 'fifties would instinctively have chosen and been chosen by the loveliest girl in the brilliant world in which they both then moved and had their being. Adela Oglander, the youngest child of a Hampshire squire, had indeed been very lovely, satisfying in every point the ideal of her day, of her race, and of her generation: slender and yet not over tall: golden-haired and blue-eyed: with delicate regular features, and rounded cheeks in which the colour soon came and went uncertainly when Richard Rebell began to haunt the Mayfair ball-rooms where he knew he would meet her and her placid, rather foolish mother. The girl's sunny beauty and artless charm of manner had delighted the social arbiters of the hour. She became, in the sense which was then possible, the fashion, and her engagement to Richard Rebell, finally arranged at the royal garden party which in those days took place each season in the old-world gardens of Chiswick House, had been to themselves as well as to their friends a happy, nine days' wonder.

Richard Rebell had been long regarded as a bachelor of bachelors, a man whose means did not permit of such a luxury as marriage to ill-dowered beauty. But his friends reminded themselves that he was in a sense heir to a fine property, now in the actual ownership of his cousin, a certain Madame Sampiero, a beautiful childless woman separated from the Corsican adventurer whom she had married in one of those moments of amazing, destructive folly which occasionally overwhelm a certain type of clever and high-spirited Englishwoman. Still, if there were some who shook their heads over the imprudence of such a marriage as that of Richard Rebell and Adela Oglander, all the world loves a lover, and every man who had obtained the privilege of an introduction to Miss Oglander envied Rebell his good fortune, for his betrothed was as good and as blithesome as she was pretty.

Later, when recalling that enchanted time, and the five happy years which had followed, Mrs. Rebell told herself that there had then been meted out to her full measure of life's happiness: she might, alas! have added that since that time Providence had dealt out to her, as completely, full measure of pain and suffering. For what was hidden from the little circle of kindly French gossips at St. Germains had been indeed a very tragic thing.

After those first cloudless years of happy, nay triumphant, married life, the popular, much-envied man-about-town, the proud husband of one of the loveliest and most considered of younger London hostesses, had gradually become aware that he was being looked at askance and shunned by those great folk to whose liking he attached perhaps undue importance.

Then had followed a period of angry, incredulous amazement, till a well-meaning friend found courage to tell him the truth. It had come to be thought that he "sometimes" cheated at cards—more, it was whispered that he had actually been caught red-handed in the house of a friend who had spared him exposure in deference to what were then still the English laws of hospitality. His chief accuser, the man to whom Rebell, once on his track, again and again traced the fatal rumour, was, as so often happens in such cases, himself quite unimportant till he became the man of straw round whom raged one of the most painful and protracted libel suits fought in nineteenth century England.

At first public opinion, or rather the opinion of those whom Rebell regarded as important, ranged itself on his side, and there were many who considered that he had been ill-advised to take any notice of the matter. But when it became known, and that in the pitiless, clear publicity afforded by a court of law, that the plaintiff's private means were very small, much smaller than had been suspected even by those who thought themselves his intimates, that he was noted for his high play, and, most damaging fact of all, that he had been instrumental in forming a new and very select club of which the stated object was play, and nothing but play, feeling veered sharply round. Richard Rebell admitted—and among his backers it was pointed out that such an admission made for innocence—that a not unimportant portion of his income had for some time past consisted of his card winnings. That this should be even said outraged those respectable folk who like to think that gambling and ruin are synonymous terms. Yet, had they looked but a little below the surface, where could they have found so striking a confirmation of their view as in this very case?

To cut the story short, the lawsuit ended in a virtual triumph for the man whose malicious dislike and envy of the plaintiff had had to himself so unexpected a result. Richard Rebell was awarded only nominal damages. The old adage, "The greater the truth the greater the libel," was freely quoted, and the one-time man of fashion and