interest in the young man’s troubles. Never before in the history of his connexion with the Hotel du Lac had Gustavo experienced such a munificent, companionable, expansive, entertaining, thoroughly unique and inexplicable guest. Even the fact that he was American scarcely accounted for everything.

  The young man raised his head and eyed his companion gloomily.

‘Gustavo, have you a sister?’

‘A sister?’ Gustavo’s manner was uncomprehending but patient. ‘Si, signore, I have eight sister.’

‘Eight! Merciful saints. How do you manage to be so cheerful?’

‘Tree is married, signore, one uvver is betrofed, one is in a convent, one is dead, and two is babies.’

‘I see—they’re pretty well disposed of; but the babies will grow up, Gustavo, and as for that betrothed one, I should still be a little nervous if I were you; you can never be sure they are going to stay betrothed. I hope she doesn’t spend her time chasing over the map of Europe making appointments with you to meet her in unheard of little mountain villages where the only approach to Christian reading matter is a Paris Herald four days old, and then doesn’t turn up to keep her appointments?’

Gustavo blinked. His supple back achieved another bow.

‘Sank you,’ he murmured.

‘And you don’t happen to have an aunt?’

‘An aunt, signore?’ There was vagueness in his tone.

‘Yes, Gustavo, an aunt. A female relative who reads you like an open book, who sees your faults and skips your virtues, who remembers how dear and good and obliging your father was at your age, who hoped great things of you when you were a baby, who had intended to make you her heir but has about decided to endow an orphan asylum—have you, Gustavo, by chance an aunt?’

‘Si, signore.’

‘I do not think you grasp my question. An aunt—the sister of your father, or perhaps your mother.’

A gleam of 

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