I advanced with still growing anger. 'Stay, King Bamfylde, stay,' said he; 'shall the beds of the mere ungenteel Aylwins, "the outside Aylwins," be made by the high Gypsy-gentility of Raxton?'

A light began to break in upon me. 'Surely,' I said, 'surely you are not Cyril Aylwin, the———?'

'Pray finish your sentence, sir, and say the low bohemian painter, the representative of the great ungenteel—the successor to the Aylwin peerage.'

The other painter, looking in blank amazement at my newly-found kinsman's extraordinary merriment, exclaimed, 'Bless me! Then you really can laugh aloud, Mr. Cyril. What has happened? What can have happened to make my dear friend laugh aloud?'

'Well he may ask,' said Cyril, turning to me. 'He knows that ever since I was a boy in jackets I have despised the man who, in a world where all is so comic, could select any particular point of the farce for his empty guffaw. But I am conquered at last. Let me introduce you, Wilderspin, to my kinsman, Henry Aylwin of Raxton Hall, alias Lord Henry Lovell of Little Egypt—one of Duke Panuel's interesting twinses.'

But Wilderspin's astonishment, apparently, was not at the rencontre: it was at the spectacle of his companion's hilarity. 'Wonderful!' he murmured, with his eyes still fastened upon Cyril. 'My dear friend can laugh aloud. Most wonderful! What can have happened?'

This is what had happened. By one of those strange coincidences which make the drama of real life far more wonderful than the drama of any stage, I, in my character of wandering Gypsy, had been thrown across the path of the bête noire of my mother and aunt, Cyril Aylwin, a painter of bohemian proclivities, who (under the name of 'Cyril') had obtained some considerable reputation. This kinsman of mine had been held up to me as a warning from my very childhood, though wherein lay his delinquencies I never did clearly understand, save that he had once been an actor—before acting had become genteel. Often as I had heard of this eccentric painter as the representative of the branch of the family which preceded mine in the succession to the coveted earldom, I had never seen him before.

He stood and looked at me in a state of intense amusement, but did not speak.

'So you are Cyril Aylwin?' I said. 'Still you must withdraw what you said to my sister about the soap.'

'Delicious!' said he, grasping my hand. 'I had no idea that high gentility numbered chivalry among its virtues. Lady Sinfi,' he continued, turning to her, 'they say this brother of yours is a character, and, by Jove! he is. And as to you, dear lady, I am proud of the family connection. The man who has two Romany Rye kinsmen may be excused for showing a little pride. I withdraw every word about the virtues of soap, and am convinced that it can do nothing with the true Romany-Aylwin brown.'