l that was
perceptible. The two friends reached the gate. Two men in livery let
down the step of a tasteful _coupe_ emblazoned with armorial bearings.
The girl with the golden eyes was the first to enter it, took her seat
at the side where she could be best seen when the carriage turned,
put her hand on the door, and waved her handkerchief in the duennna's
despite. In contempt of what might be said by the curious, her
handkerchief cried to Henri openly: "Follow me!"

"Have you ever seen a handkerchief better thrown?" said Henri to Paul de
Manerville.

Then, observing a fiacre on the point of departure, having just set down
a fare, he made a sign to the driver to wait.

"Follow that carriage, notice the house and the street where it
stops--you shall have ten francs.... Paul, adieu."

The cab followed the _coupe_. The _coupe_ stopped in the Rue Saint
Lazare before one of the finest houses of the neighborhood.

De Marsay was not impulsive. Any other young man would have obeyed his
impulse to obtain at once some information about a girl who realized so
fully the most luminous ideas ever expressed upon women in the poetry
of the East; but, too experienced to compromise his good fortune, he had
told his coachman to continue along the Rue Saint Lazare and carry him
back to his house. The next day, his confidential valet, Laurent by
name, as cunning a fellow as the Frontin of the old comedy, waited in
the vicinity of the house inhabited by the unknown for the hour at which
letters were distributed. In order to be able to spy at his ease and
hang about the house, he had followed the example of those police
officers who seek a good disguise, and bought up cast-off clothes of
an Auvergnat, the appearance of whom he sought to imitate. When the
postman, who went the round of the Rue Saint Lazare that morning, passed
by, Laurent feigned to be a porter unable to remember the name of a
person to whom he had to deliver a parcel, and consulted the postman.
Deceived at first by appearances, this personage, so picturesque in the
midst of Parisian civilization, informed him that the house in which
the girl with the golden eyes dwelt belonged to Don Hijos, Marquis de
San-Real, grandee of Spain. Naturally, it was not with the Marquis that
the Auvergnat was concerned.

"My parcel," he said, "is for the marquise."

"She is away," replied the postman. "Her letters are forwarded to
London."

"Then the marquise is not a young girl who...