Madame Munster gave a little laugh.  “A man of the Chinese world!  He must be very interesting.”

“I have an idea that he brought home a fortune,” said Felix.

“That is always interesting.  Is he young, good-looking, clever?”

“He is less than forty; he has a baldish head; he says witty things.  I rather think,” added the young man, “that he will admire the Baroness Munster.”

“It is very possible,” said this lady.  Her brother never knew how she would take things; but shortly afterwards she declared that he had made a very pretty description and that on the morrow she would go and see for herself.

They mounted, accordingly, into a great barouche—­a vehicle as to which the Baroness found nothing to criticise but the price that was asked for it and the fact that the coachman wore a straw hat. (At Silberstadt Madame Munster had had liveries of yellow and crimson.) They drove into the country, and the Baroness, leaning far back and swaying her lace-fringed parasol, looked to right and to left and surveyed the way-side objects.  After a while she pronounced them “affreux.”  Her brother remarked that it was apparently a country in which the foreground was inferior to the plans recules:  and the Baroness rejoined that the landscape seemed to be all foreground.  Felix had fixed with his new friends the hour at which he should bring his sister; it was four o’clock in the afternoon.  The large, clean-faced house wore, to his eyes, as the barouche drove up to it, a very friendly aspect; the high, slender elms made lengthening shadows in front of it.  The Baroness descended; her American kinsfolk were stationed in the portico.  Felix waved his hat to them, and a tall, lean gentleman, with a high forehead and a clean shaven face, came forward toward the garden gate.  Charlotte Wentworth walked at his side.  Gertrude came behind, more slowly.  Both of these young ladies wore rustling silk dresses.  Felix ushered his sister into the gate.  “Be very gracious,” he said to her.  But he saw the admonition was superfluous.  Eugenia was prepared to be gracious as only Eugenia could be.  Felix knew no keener pleasure than to be able to admire his sister unrestrictedly; for if the opportunity was frequent, it was not inveterate.  When she desired to please she was to him, as to every one else, the most charming woman in the world.  Then he forgot that she was ever anything else; that she was sometimes hard and perverse; that he was occasionally afraid of her.  Now, as she took his arm to pass into the garden, he felt that she desired, that she proposed, to please, and this situation made him very happy.  Eugenia would please.