I

At the Castanados', the second evening after, Chester was welcomed into
a specially pretty living-room. But he found three other visitors.
Madame, seated on a sort of sofa for one, made no effort to rise. Her
face, for all its breadth, was sweet in repose and sweeter when she
spoke or smiled. Her hands were comparatively small and the play of
her vast arms was graceful as she said to a slim, tallish, comely woman
with an abundance of soft, well-arranged hair:

"Seraphine, allow me to pres-ent Mr. Chezter."

She explained that this Mme. Alexandre was her "neighbor of the next
door," and Chester remembered her sign: "Laces and Embroideries."

"Scipion," said Castanado to a short, swarthy, broad-bearded man, "I
have the honor to make you acquaint' with my friend Mr. Chezter."

Chester pressed the enveloping hand of "S. Beloiseau, Artisan in
Ornamental Iron-work."

"Also, Mr. Chezter, Mr. Rene Ducatel; but with him you are already
acquaint', I think, eh?"

Chester shook hands with a small, dapper, early-gray, superdignified
man, recalling his sign: "Antiques in Furniture, Glass, Bronze, Plate,
China, and Jewelry." M. Ducatel seemed to be already taking leave.
His "anceztral 'ome," he said, was far up-town; he had dropped in
solely to borrow--showing it--the _Courrier des Etats-Unis_.

That journal, Castanado remarked to Chester as at a corner table he
poured him a glass of cordial, brought the war, the trenches, the poilu
and the boche closer than any other they knew. Beloiseau and Mme.
Alexandre, he softly explained, had come in quite unlooked-for to
discuss the great strife and might depart at any moment. Then the
reading!

But Chester himself interested those two and they stayed. When he said
that Beloiseau's sidewalk samples had often made him covet some excuse
for going in and seeing both the stock and the craftsman, "That was
excuse ab-undant!" was the prompt response, and Castanado put in:

"Scipion he'd rather, always, a non-buying connoisseur than a buying
Philistine."

"Come any day! any hour!" said Beloiseau.

Presently all five were talking of the surviving poetry of both
artistic and historic Royal Street. "Twenty year' ag-o," said the
ironworker, "looking down-street from my shop, there was not a building
in sight without a romantic story. My God! for example, that Hotel St.
Louis!"

Chester--"had heard one or two of its episodes only the evening before,
at that up-town dinner, fro