rights. For all practical purposes except that of suffering he was a
dead man. The little child he had been so careful not to wake up when
he kissed her in her cot, inherited all the fortune after Prince John's
death. Her existence saved those immense estates from confiscation.

"It was twenty-five years before Prince Roman, stone deaf, his health
broken, was permitted to return to Poland. His daughter married
splendidly to a Polish Austrian _grand seigneur_ and, moving in the
cosmopolitan sphere of the highest European aristocracy, lived mostly
abroad in Nice and Vienna. He, settling down on one of her estates, not
the one with the palatial residence but another where there was a modest
little house, saw very little of her.

"But Prince Roman did not shut himself up as if his work were done.
There was hardly anything done in the private and public life of the
neighbourhood, in which Prince Roman's advice and assistance were not
called upon, and never in vain. It was well said that his days did not
belong to himself but to his fellow citizens. And especially he was the
particular friend of all returned exiles, helping them with purse and
advice, arranging their affairs and finding them means of livelihood.

"I heard from my uncle many tales of his devoted activity, in which he
was always guided by a simple wisdom, a high sense of honour, and the
most scrupulous conception of private and public probity. He remains a
living figure for me because of that meeting in a billiard room, when,
in my anxiety to hear about a particularly wolfish wolf, I came in
momentary contact with a man who was preeminently a man amongst all men
capable of feeling deeply, of believing steadily, of loving ardently.

"I remember to this day the grasp of Prince Roman's bony, wrinkled hand