ome points, unworthy of a man of the world,
that he did not always let her go her own way without question, though
he ought to have learnt by this time to trust her in everything.

He now came up and asked General Ratoneau if he would play a game of
billiards. Most of the men had already left the salon. The General
grunted an assent, and rose stiffly to follow his host, with a grave bow
to Madame de Sainfoy. The Comte walked with him half across the room,
then suddenly turned back to meet his wife, whose preoccupation he had
noticed rather curiously.

"You have other guests, Adelaide!" he said, so that she alone could
hear.

"I have," she answered. "And I must talk to you presently. I have
something to say."

He gazed an instant into her eyes, which were very blue and shining, but
he found no answer to the question in his own, and hurried at once away.
Without the Prefect's scrap of information or his wider knowledge of
men, he did not even guess what those two could have been talking about.
Something political, he supposed; Adelaide loved politics, and could
throw herself into them with anybody, even such a lump of arrogant
vulgarity as this fellow Ratoneau. She thought it wise, no doubt, to
cultivate imperial officials. But in that case why did she not bestow
the lion's share of her smiles on the Prefect, a greater man and a
gentleman into the bargain? Why did she let him waste his pleasant talk
on the dowagers of Anjou, while she sat absorbed with that animal?

The guests, thirty or more, were scattered between the billiard-room,
the smaller drawing-room, where card-tables were set out, and the large
drawing-room, given up to conversation and presently to the acting of a
proverb by several of the younger people and Mademoiselle Moineau, who
played the part of a great-grandmother to perfection.

Angelot so distinguished himself as a jealous lover that Helene could
hardly sit calmly to look on, and several people told him and his mother
that his right place was at the _Francais_.

"It is part of our life at La Mariniere," Anne said with a shade of
impatience to the Prefect, who was talking to her. "When we are not
singing or playing or dancing or shooting, we are acting. It does not
sound like a very responsible kind of life."

"Ah, madame," Monsieur de Mauves said softly, in his kind way, "we
French people know how to play and to work at the same time. All these
little amusements do not hinder people from con