“How beautiful they are!” mused Codlingsby, as he surveyed these placid groups calmly taking their pleasure in the sunset.

“D’you vant to look at a nishe coat?” a voice said, which made him start; and then some one behind him began handling a masterpiece of Stultz’s with a familiarity which would have made the baron tremble.

“Rafael Mendoza!” exclaimed Godfrey.

“The same, Lord Codlingsby,” the individual so apostrophized replied.  “I told you we should meet again where you would little expect me.  Will it please you to enter? this is Friday, and we close at sunset.  It rejoices my heart to welcome you home.”  So saying Rafael laid his hand on his breast, and bowed, an oriental reverence.  All traces of the accent with which he first addressed Lord Codlingsby had vanished:  it was disguise; half the Hebrew’s life is a disguise.  He shields himself in craft, since the Norman boors persecuted him.

They passed under an awning of old clothes, tawdry fripperies, greasy spangles, and battered masks, into a shop as black and hideous as the entrance was foul.  “This your home, Rafael?” said Lord Codlingsby.

“Why not?” Rafael answered.  “I am tired of Schloss Schinkenstein; the Rhine bores me after a while.  It is too hot for Florence; besides they have not completed the picture-gallery, and my place smells of putty.  You wouldn’t have a man, mon cher, bury himself in his chateau in Normandy, out of the hunting season?  The Rugantino Palace stupefies me.  Those Titians are so gloomy, I shall have my Hobbimas and Tenierses, I think, from my house at the Hague hung over them.”

“How many castles, palaces, houses, warehouses, shops, have you, Rafael?” Lord Codlingsby asked, laughing.

“This is one,” Rafael answered.  “Come in.”

II.

The noise in the old town was terrific; Great Tom was booming sullenly over the uproar; the bell of Saint Mary’s was clanging with alarm; St. Giles’s tocsin chimed furiously; howls, curses, flights of brickbats, stones shivering windows, groans of wounded men, cries of frightened females, cheers of either contending party as it charged the enemy from Carfax to Trumpington Street, proclaimed that the battle was at its height.

In Berlin they would have said it was a revolution, and the cuirassiers would have been charging, sabre in hand, amidst that infuriate mob.  In France they would have brought down artillery, and played on it with twenty-four pounders.  In Cambridge nobody heeded the disturbance—­it was a Town and Gown row.