ommended to it?"

"No; I happened to be in this neighbourhood on business, and walked in,
as I might into any other cafe."

"You don't interest yourself in the great social questions which are
agitated below the surface of this best of all possible worlds?"

"I can't say that I trouble my head much about them."

"A game at dominos before M. Georges arrives?"

"Willingly. Is M. Georges one of those agitators below the surface?"

"No, indeed. It is for you to play."

Here M. Georges arrived, and no further conversation on political or
social questions ensued.

Graham had already called more than once at M. Lebeau's office,
and asked him to put into good French various letters on matters of
business, the subjects of which had been furnished by M. Renard. The
office was rather imposing and stately, considering the modest nature of
M. Lebeau's ostensible profession. It occupied the entire ground-floor
of a corner house, with a front-door at one angle and a back-door at the
other. The anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to
wait some minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled,
and not only by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance,
might be fairly supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid
as polite letter-writers,--not only by servant-maids and grisettes,
by sailors, zouaves, and journeymen workmen,--but not unfrequently by
clients evidently belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class
of society,--men with clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again,
who, less fashionably attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers
of well-to-do families,--the first generally young, the last generally
middle-aged. All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by
a saturnine clerk into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in
precedence of the ouvriers and grisettes.

"What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this
humble business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy
concealed,--the International Association?" And so pondering, the clerk
one day singled him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau's
cabinet. Graham thought the time had now arrived when he might safely
approach the subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.

"You are very good," said Graham, speaking in the English of a young
earl in our elegant novels,--"you are very good to let me in while you
have so many swells and nobs waiti