Our Own Set

as promised that my nephew should have the appointment," muttered the countess. "It is disgusting!"

"Utterly!" said Sempaly with a whimsical intonation. "A foreign element is always intrusive; we are much more comfortable among ourselves."

Tea was now brought in on a Japanese table and the secretary and his inferior birth were for the time forgotten.

CHAPTER II.

Sempaly was not merely affecting the democrat to annoy his cousin the countess; he firmly believed himself to be a liberal because he laughed at conservatism, and regarded the nobility as a time-honored structure--a relic of the past, like the pyramids, only not quite so perdurable. But in spite of his theoretical respect for the rights of man and his satirical contempt for the claims of privilege, Sempaly was really less tolerant than his cousin of "the dark ages." Ilsenbergh, with all his feudal crotchets, was an aristocrat only from a sense of fitness while Sempaly was an ari