sense
of repaying its indifference. Before long a carriage drove up to the
pavement directly in front of him and remained standing for several
minutes without sign from its occupant. It was one of those neat plain
coupes, drawn by a single powerful horse, in which the flaneur figures
a pale handsome woman buried among silk cushions and yawning as she sees
the gas-lamps glittering in the gutters. At last the door opened and out
stepped Richard de Mauves. He stopped and leaned on the window for some
time, talking in an excited manner to a person within. At last he gave a
nod and the carriage rolled away. He stood swinging his cane and looking
up and down the boulevard, with the air of a man fumbling, as one
might say, the loose change of time. He turned toward the cafe and was
apparently, for want of anything better worth his attention, about to
seat himself at one of the tables when he noticed Longmore. He wavered
an instant and then, without a shade of difference in his careless gait,
advanced to the accompaniment of a thin recognition. It was the first
time they had met since their encounter in the forest after Longmore's
false start for Brussels. Madame Clairin's revelations, as he might have
regarded them, had not made the Count especially present to his mind; he
had had another call to meet than the call of disgust. But now, as M. de
Mauves came toward him he felt abhorrence well up. He made out, however,
for the first time, a cloud on this nobleman's superior clearness, and a
delight at finding the shoe somewhere at last pinching HIM, mingled with
the resolve to be blank and unaccommodating, enabled him to meet the
occasion with due promptness.

M. de Mauves sat down, and the two men looked at each other across the
table, exchanging formal remarks that did little to lend grace to their
encounter. Longmore had no reason to suppose the Count knew of his
sister's various interventions. He was sure M. de Mauves cared very
little about his opinions, and yet he had a sense of something grim in
his own New York face which would have made him change colour if keener
suspicion had helped it to be read there. M. de Mauves didn't change
colour, but he looked at his wife's so oddly, so more than naturally
(wouldn't it be?) detached friend with an intentness that betrayed at
once an irritating memory of the episode in the Bois de Boulogne and
such vigilant curiosity as was natural to a gentleman who had entrusted
his "honour" t