father, to your dead father.' The mother laid her head on the block, but
he could not strike. 'Be not the first coward of our name, strike;
remember your promise to us all,' and her head was struck off."

"And the son," the girl asks, "what became of him?"

"He never was seen, save at night, walking, a solitary man, beneath the
walls of his castle in Granada."

"And whom did he marry?"

"He never married."

Then after a long silence some one said,--

"Whose story is that?"

"Balzac's."

At that moment the glass door of the _café_ grated upon the sanded
floor, and Manet entered. Although by birth and by art essentially
Parisian, there was something in his appearance and manner of speaking
that often suggested an Englishman. Perhaps it was his dress--his
clean-cut clothes and figure. That figure! those square shoulders that
swaggered as he went across a room and the thin waist; and that face,
the beard and nose, satyr-like shall I say? No, for I would evoke an
idea of beauty of line united to that of intellectual expression--frank
words, frank passion in his convictions, loyal and simple phrases, clear
as well-water, sometimes a little hard, sometimes, as they flowed away,
bitter, but at the fountain head sweet and full of light. He sits next