toration of France, has journeyed to
England for us. None could execute the commission so capably, or without
danger of arousing suspicion. There! I have told you all I know. We must
wait, my compatriots. We must wait."

"And in the mean time," purred the voice of the Abbe Touvent, "for the
digestion, Monsieur le Marquis--for the digestion."

For it was one of the features of Madame de Chantonnay's Thursdays that
no servants were allowed in the room; but the guests waited on each
other. If the servants, as is to be presumed, listened outside the door,
they were particular not to introduce each succeeding guest without
first knocking, which caused a momentary silence and added considerably
to the sense of political importance of those assembled. The Abbe
Touvent made it his special care to preside over the table where small
glasses of eau-de-vie d'Armagnac and other aids to digestion were set
out in a careful profusion.

"It is a theory, my dear Marquis," admitted Madame de Chantonnay. "But
it is nothing more. It has no heart in it, your theory. Now I have a
theory of my own."

"Full of heart, one may assure oneself, Madame; full of heart," murmured
the Marquis. "For you yourself are full of heart--is it not so?"

"I hope not," Juliette whispered to her fan, with a little smile of
malicious amusement. For she had a youthful contempt for persons old
and stout, who talk ignorantly of matters only understood by such as
are young and slim and pretty. She looked at her fan with a gleam of
ill-concealed irony and glanced over it toward Albert de Chantonnay,
who, with a consideration which must have been hereditary, was uneasy
about the alteration he had made in his whiskers. It was perhaps unfair,
he felt, to harrow young and tender hearts.

It was at this moment that a loud knock commanded a breathless silence,
for no more guests were expected. Indeed the whole neighbourhood was
present.

The servant, in his faded gold lace, came in and announced with a
dramatic assurance: "Monsieur de Borbone--Monsieur Colville."

And that difference which Dormer Colville had predicted was manifested
with an astounding promptness; for all who were seated rose to their
feet. It was Colville who had given the names to the servant in the
order in which they had been announced, and at the last minute, on the
threshold, he had stepped on one side and with his hand on Barebone's
shoulder had forced him to take precedence.

The first per