He leant against a tree, and gave utterance to peal after peal of laughter.

I advanced with rapidly rising anger, but his hilarity had so overmastered him that he did not heed it.

‘Wilderspin,’ cried he, ’come here!  Pray come here.  Have I not often told you the reason why I threw up my engagement with my theatrical manager, and missed my high vocation in ungenteel comedy?  Have I not often told you that it sprang from no disrespect to my friends, the comic actors, but from the feeling that no comedian can hope to be comic enough to compete with the real thing—­the true harlequinade of everyday life, roaring and screaming around me wherever I go?’

Then, without waiting for his companion’s reply, he turned to me, and giving an added volume to his sonorous voice, said: 

’And you, Sir King, do you know whose bed Your Majesty was going to make at the bidding of—­well, of a duke’s chavi?’

I advanced with still growing anger.  ‘Stay, King Bamfylde, stay,’ said he; ’shall the beds of the mere ungenteel Aylwins, “the outside Aylwins,” be made by the high Gypsy-gentility of Raxton?’

A light began to break in upon me.  ‘Surely,’ I said, ’surely you are
not Cyril Aylwin, the------?’

’Pray finish your sentence, sir, and say the low bohemian painter, the representative of the great ungenteel—­the successor to the Aylwin peerage.’

The other painter, looking in blank amazement at my newly-found kinsman’s extraordinary merriment, exclaimed, ’Bless me!  Then you really can laugh aloud, Mr. Cyril.  What has happened?  What can have happened to make my dear friend laugh aloud?’

‘Well he may ask,’ said Cyril, turning to me.  ’He knows that ever since I was a boy in jackets I have despised the man who, in a world where all is so comic, could select any particular point of the farce for his empty guffaw.  But I am conquered at last.  Let me introduce you, Wilderspin, to my kinsman, Henry Aylwin of Raxton Hall, alias Lord Henry Lovell of Little Egypt—­one of Duke Panuel’s interesting twinses.’

But Wilderspin’s astonishment, apparently, was not at the rencontre:  it was at the spectacle of his companion’s hilarity.  ‘Wonderful!’ he murmured, with his eyes still fastened upon Cyril.  ’My dear friend can laugh aloud.  Most wonderful!  What can have happened?’

This is what had happened.  By one of those strange coincidences which make the drama of real life far more wonderful than the drama of any stage, I, in my character of wandering Gypsy, had been thrown across the path of the bete noire of my mother and aunt, Cyril Aylwin, a painter of bohemian proclivities, who (under the name of ‘Cyril’) had obtained some considerable reputation.  This kinsman of mine had been held up to me as a warning from my very childhood, though wherein lay his delinquencies I never did clearly understand, save that he had once been an actor—­before acting had become genteel.  Often as I had heard of this eccentric painter as the representative of the branch of the family which preceded mine in the succession to the coveted earldom, I had never seen him before.