newspapers.

The household at Villa Rubein was indeed of a mixed and curious nature.
Cut on both floors by corridors, the Villa was divided into four
divisions; each of which had its separate inhabitants, an arrangement
which had come about in the following way:

When old Nicholas Treffry died, his estate, on the boundary of
Cornwall, had been sold and divided up among his three surviving
children--Nicholas, who was much the eldest, a partner in the well-known
firm of Forsyte and Treffry, teamen, of the Strand; Constance, married
to a man called Decie; and Margaret, at her father's death engaged to
the curate of the parish, John Devorell, who shortly afterwards became
its rector. By his marriage with Margaret Treffry the rector had one
child called Christian. Soon after this he came into some property, and
died, leaving it unfettered to his widow. Three years went by, and when
the child was six years old, Mrs. Devorell, still young and pretty, came
to live in London with her brother Nicholas. It was there that she met
Paul von Morawitz--the last of an old Czech family, who had lived for
many hundred years on their estates near Budweiss. Paul had been left an
orphan at the age of ten, and without a solitary ancestral acre. Instead
of acres, he inherited the faith that nothing was too good for a von
Morawitz. In later years his savoir faire enabled him to laugh at faith,
but it stayed quietly with him all the same. The absence of acres was of
no great consequence, for through his mother, the daughter of a banker
in Vienna, he came into a well-nursed fortune. It befitted a von
Morawitz that he should go into the Cavalry, but, unshaped for
soldiering, he soon left the Service; some said he had a difference with
his Colonel over the quality of food provided during some manoeuvres;
others that he had retired because his chargers did not fit his legs,