turned and went back to resume with his pupil, the Vicomte de
Villeniort, the interrupted exposition of the demi-contre of Danet,
illustrating with a small-sword the advantages to be derived from its
adoption.

Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of his
pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights
of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon
and on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone
without deranging the academy. When having touched the Vicomte three
times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present,
it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical
action. Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist
and arm and knees had automatically performed their work, like the
accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and
more had combined them.

Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the
impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning.
Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed--by one
of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown
out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing
freely--Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.

The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head
of the family than did his person. A man of the Court, where his brother
was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M.
le Comte d'Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing
villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently
situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily
accessible from either. M. d'Artois--the royal tennis-player--had been
amongst the very first to emigrate. Together with the Condes, the
Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen's intimate council, old
Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realized that their
very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France
immediately after the fall of the Bastille. He had gone to play tennis
beyond the frontier--and there consummate the work of ruining the French
monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France. With
him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou,
and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and f