the galleries, unamazed at the slowness to which the throng of loungers
reduced his pace; he seemed accustomed to the stately step which is
ironically nicknamed the ambassador's strut; still, his dignity had a
touch of the theatrical. Though his features were handsome and imposing,
his hat, from beneath which thick black curls stood out, was perhaps
tilted a little too much over the right ear, and belied his gravity by
a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive and half closed, looked down
disdainfully on the crowd.

"There goes a remarkably good-looking young man," said a girl in a low
voice, as she made way for him to pass.

"And who is only too well aware of it!" replied her companion aloud--who
was very plain.

After walking all round the arcades, the young man looked by turns at
the sky and at his watch, and with a shrug of impatience went into a
tobacconist's shop, lighted a cigar, and placed himself in front of a
looking-glass to glance at his costume, which was rather more ornate
than the rules of French taste allow. He pulled down his collar and his
black velvet waistcoat, over which hung many festoons of the thick gold
chain that is made at Venice; then, having arranged the folds of his
cloak by a single jerk of his left shoulder, draping it gracefully so
as to show the velvet lining, he started again on parade, indifferent to
the glances of the vulgar.

As soon as the shops were lighted up and the dusk seemed to him black
enough, he went out into the square in front of the Palais-Royal, but as
a man anxious not to be recognized; for he kept close under the houses
as far as the fountain, screened by the hackney-cab stand, till he
reached the Rue Froid-Manteau, a dirty, poky, disreputable street--a
sort of sewer tolerated by the police close to the purified purlieus of
the Palais-Royal, as an Italian major-domo allows a careless servant to
leave the sweepings of the rooms in a corner of the staircase.

The young man hesitated. He might have been a bedizened citizen's wife
craning her neck over a gutter swollen by the rain. But the hour was not
unpropitious for the indulgence of some discreditable whim. Earlier, he
might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut out. Tempted
by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting, to have
followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for a day,
thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by a
thousand reasons to her a