distract myself from sorrow, and strengthen my
reason against the illusions of my fantasy.
The Luminous Shadow was not seen again on
my wall, and the thought of Margrave himself
was banished.

In this building I passed many hours of each
day, more and more earnestly plunging my
thoughts into the depths of abstract study, as
Lilian's unaccountable dislike to my presence
became more and more decided. When I thus
ceased to think that my life cheered and comforted
hers, my heart's occupation was gone. I
had annexed to the apartment reserved for myself
in this log hut a couple of spare rooms, in
which I could accommodate passing strangers.
I learned to look forward to their coming with
interest, and to see them depart with regret;
yet, for the most part, they were of the ordinary
class of colonial adventurers: bankrupt
tradesmen, unlucky farmers, forlorn mechanics,
hordes of unskilled labourers, now and then a
briefless barrister, or a sporting collegian who
had lost his all on the Derby. One day, however,
a young man of education and manners
that unmistakably proclaimed the cultured
gentleman of Europe stopped at my door. He was
a cadet, of a noble Prussian family, which for
some political reasons had settled itself in Paris;
there, lie had become intimate with young
French nobles, and, living the life of a young
French noble, had soon scandalised his German
parents, forestalled his slender inheritance, and
been compelled to fly his father's frown and his
tailors' bills. All this he told me with a lively
frankness which proved how much the wit of a
German can be quickened in the atmosphere of
Paris. An old college friend, of birth inferior
to his own, had been as unfortunate in seeking
to make money as this young prodigal had been
an adept in spending it. The friend, a few years
previously, had accompanied other Germans in a
migration to Australia, and was already thriving;
the spendthrift noble was on his way to join the
bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty
miles distant from my house. This young man
was unlike any German I ever met. He had all
the exquisite levity by which the well-bred
Frenchman gives to the doctrines of the Cynic
the grace of the Epicurean. He owned himself
to be good for nothing with an elegance of
candour which not only disarmed censure, but
seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal,
the happy spendthrift was so inebriate with
hope— sure that he should be rich before he was
thirty. How and wherefore rich?— he could
have no more explained than I can square the
circle. When the grand serious German nature
does Frenchify itself, it can become so extra-
vagantly French!

I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted
profligate's babble, as we sat by my
rude fireside—I, sombre man of science and
sorrow, he, smiling child of idlesse and pleasure,
so much one of Nature's courtier-like nobles,
that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in his
dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his
ruffianly revolver stuck into his belt, I would defy
the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as
critic over the holiday world not to have said,
"There sits the genius beyond my laws, the
born darling of the Graces, who in every
circumstance, in every age, like Aristippus, would
have socially charmed— would have been welcome
to the orgies of a Caesar or a Claudius, to
the boudoirs of a Moutespan or a Pompadour
—have lounged through the Mulberry Gardens
with a .Rochester and a Buckingham, or
smiled, from the death-cart with a Richelieu
and a Lauzun—a gentleman's disdain of a
mob!"

I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk
frothing up from his careless lips, when
suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that
light talk was flung forth the name of
Margrave.

"Margrave!" I exclaimed. "Pardon me.
What of him?"

"What of him! I asked if, by chance, you
knew the only Englishman I ever had the
meanness to envy?"

"Perhaps you speak of one person, and I
thought of another."

"Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely
be two Margraves! The one I mean flashed
like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a prince
of the Bourse a palace that might have lodged a
prince of the blood royal, eclipsed our Jew
bankers in splendour, our jeunesse dorée in good
looks and hair-brain adventures, and, strangest
of all, filled his salons with philosophers and
charlatans, chemists and spirit-rappers; insulting
the gravest dons of the schools by bringing
them face to face with the most impudent
quacks, the most ridiculous dreamers—and yet,
withal, himself so racy and charming, so bon
prince, so bon enfant! For six months he was
the rage at Paris: perhaps he might have
continued to be the rage there for six years, but all
at once the meteor vanished as suddenly as it
had flashed. Is this the Margrave whom you
know?"

"I should not have thought the Margrave
whom I knew could have reconciled his tastes
to the life of cities."

"Nor could this man: cities were too tame
for him. He has gone to some far-remote wilds
in the East— some say in search of the
Philosopher's stone for he actually maintained in
his house a Sicilian adventurer, who, when at
work on that famous discovery, was stifled by
the fumes of his own crucible. After that misfortune
Margrave took Paris in disgust, and we
lost him."

"So this is the only Englishman whom you
envy!  Envy him!  Why?"

"Because he is the only Englishman I ever
met who contrived to be rich and yet free from
the spleen; I envied him because one had only
to look at his face, and see how thoroughly
he enjoyed the life of which your countrymen
seem to be so heartily tired! But now
that I have satisfied your curiosity, pray
satisfy mine.  Who and what is this Englishman?"