Oswald is the heir, Georges is the next to inherit.
Scarcely were the usual formal greetings over when Oswald made an attempt to join his pretty cousin Gabrielle, with the laudable purpose of helping her to pour out tea. His design was cruelly frustrated, however, by Count Truyn, who instantly engaged him in a brisk discussion of the latest anti-Catholic measures on the part of the Republic. Oswald sat beside his uncle restlessly drumming on the brim of his opera-hat, the image of politely-concealed youthful impatience, now and then adding an "abominable!" or a "disgusting," to the indignant expressions of the elder man, and all the while glancing towards Gabrielle. Certain personal matters interested him far more just now than the deplorable excesses of the French government. He had not read the article in the _Temps_ to which his uncle alluded, he did not take the French Republic at all in earnest, he considered it in fact no Republic at all, but only a monarchy gone mad; French politics interested him from an ethnographical point of view only, all which he calmly confessed to his uncle, by whom he was scolded as "unpardonably indifferent," and "culpably blind." The elder man's conservative philippics grew more eager, and the younger one's courteous admissions more vague, until at last Zinka succeeded in releasing the latter by asking Gabrielle to sing something. Gabrielle, of course, declared that she was hoarse, but Oswald who was, by the way, about as much interested in her singing from a musical point of view as in the trumpet-solos of the emperor of Russia, smiled away her objections and rising, with a sigh of relief, went to open the grand piano.
No one seemed to have any idea of according a strict silence to the young girl's music, and whilst Gabrielle warbled in a sweet, but rather thin voice, some majestic air of Handel's, and Oswald leaning against the cover of the instrument looked down at her with ardent intentness, Georges, his hands upon his knees, his body inclined towards the Baroness Melkweyser who, still busied with her refreshments, was disposing of sandwich after sandwich, said: "You are wearing yourself out in the service of mankind. Have you allowed yourself one half-hour's repose to-day?--No, not one--as any one may see who looks at you. _A propos_, who was the Japanese woman dressed in yellow at whose side I saw you to-day sitting in a fainting condition in a landau--in front of Gouache's was it?--on the Boulevard de la Madeleine?"