“I know them very well,” he said, presently, “but I thought they were here.”

“No, they left suddenly for Paris a month ago.”

“I can very easily find out for you,” said Benoni, his Bright eyes turning on me with a searching look.  “I can find out from Lira’s banker, who is probably also mine.  What is the matter with that young man?  He is as sad as Don Quixote.”

“Nino?  He is probably in love,” I said, rather indiscreetly.

“In love?  Then of course he is in love with Mademoiselle de Lira, and has gone to Paris to find her, and cannot.  That is why you ask me.”  I was so much astonished at the quickness of his guesswork that I stared, open-mouthed.

“He must have told you!” I exclaimed at last.

“Nothing of the kind.  In the course of a long life I have learned to put two and two together, that is all.  He is in love, he is your boy, and you are looking for a certain young lady.  It is as clear as day.”  But in reality he had guessed the secret long before.

“Very well,” said I, humbly, but doubting him, all the same, “I can only admire your perspicacity.  But I would be greatly obliged if you would find out where they are, those good people.  You seem to be a friend of my boy’s, baron.  Help him, and he will be grateful to you.  It is not such a very terrible thing that a great artist should love a noble’s daughter, after all, though I used to think so.”  Benoni laughed, that strange laugh which Nino had described,—­a laugh that seemed to belong to another age.

“You amuse me with your prejudices about nobility,” he said, and his brown eyes flashed and twinkled again.  “The idea of talking about nobility in this age!  You might as well talk of the domestic economy of the Garden of Eden.”

“But you are yourself a noble—­a baron,” I objected.

“Oh, I am anything you please,” said Benoni.  “Some idiot made a baron of me the other day because I lent him money and he could not pay it.  But I have some right to it, after all, for I am a Jew.  The only real nobles are Welshmen and Jews.  You cannot call anything so ridiculously recent as the European upper classes a nobility.  Now I go straight back to the creation of the world, like all my countrymen.  The Hibernians get a factitious reputation for antiquity by saying that Eve married an Irishman after Adam died, and that is about as much claim as your European nobles have to respectability.  Bah!  I know their beginnings, very small indeed.”

“You also seem to have strong prejudices on the subject,” said I, not wishing to contradict a guest in my house.

“So strong that it amounts to having no prejudices at all.  Your boy wants to marry a noble damosel.  In Heaven’s name let him do it.  Let us manage it amongst us.  Love is a grand thing.  I have loved several women all their lives.  Do not look surprised.  I am a very old man; they have all died, and at present I am not in love with anybody.  I suppose it cannot last long, however.  I loved a woman once on a time”—­Benoni paused.  He seemed to be on the verge of a soliloquy, and his strange, bright face, which seemed illuminated always with a deathless vitality, became dreamy and looked older.  But he recollected himself and rose to go.  His eye caught sight of the guitar that hung on the wall.