the present moment--let alone the army--who would
refuse ungrudging admiration to Napoleon himself and to his genius. But
as a nation England has her interests to safeguard. She has suffered
enough--and through him--in her commerce and her prosperity in the past
twenty years--she must have peace now at any cost."

"Ah! I know," sighed the other, "a nation of shopkeepers. . . ."

"Yes. We are that, I suppose. We are shopkeepers . . . most of us.
. . ."

"I didn't mean to use the word in any derogatory sense," protested
Victor de Marmont with the ready politeness peculiar to his race. "Why,
even you . . ."

"I don't see why you should say 'even you,'" broke in Clyffurde quietly.
"I am a shopkeeper--nothing more. . . . I buy goods and sell them again.
. . . I buy the gloves which our friend M. Dumoulin manufactures at
Grenoble and sell them to any London draper who chooses to buy them
. . . a very mean and ungentlemanly occupation, is it not?"

He spoke French with perfect fluency, and only with the merest suspicion
of a drawl in the intonation of the vowels, which suggested rather than
proclaimed his nationality; and just now there was not the slightest
tone of bitterness apparent in his deep-toned and mellow voice. Once
more his friend would have protested, but he put up a restraining hand.

"Oh!" he said with a smile, "I don't imagine for a moment that you have
the same prejudices as our mutual friend M. le Comte de Cambray, who
must have made a very violent sacrifice to his feelings when he admitted
me as a guest to his own table. I am sure he must often think that the
servants' hall is the proper place for me."

"The Comte de Cambray," retorted de Marmont with a sneer, "is full up to
his eyes with the prejudices and arrogance of his caste. It is men of
his type--and not Marat or Robespierre--who made the revolution, who
goaded the people of France into becoming something worse than
man-devouring beasts. And, mind you, twenty years of exile did not sober
them, nor did contact with democratic thought in England and America
teach them the most elementary lessons of commonsense. If the Emperor
had not come back to-day, we should be once more working up for
revolution--more terrible this time, more bloody and vengeful, if
possible, than the last."

Then as Clyffurde made no comment on this peroration, the younger man
resumed more lightly:

"And--knowing the Comte de Cambray's prejudices as I do, imagine my
surpr