a foot-warmer, looking at, but without observing the cold figures
that walked rapidly past him, the houses lighted up by the sun's rays,
and the dry pavements, and he thought of those strange eyes and those
black butterflies, which seemed to him to flutter over that fair hair
like swallows over a field of ripe wheat.

It pleased him to think of that woman. It was an entirely changed
preoccupation, a relaxation. A curious, strangely agreeable sensation:
his imagination thus playing truant, and wandering toward that vision,
renewed his youth. He experienced therein the perplexities that troubled
him at twenty. Love in the heart means fewer white hairs on the brow.
And then, indeed, he would never, perhaps, see Mademoiselle Kayser
again! He would, however, do everything to see her again at the coming
soiree at the ministry, an invitation--Suddenly his thoughts abruptly
turned to Ramel, whom he also wished to invite and meet again. He loved
him so dearly. It was he who formerly, in the journalistic days, and at
the time of the battles fought in the _Nation Francaise_, had called
Denis "a conscience in a dress-coat."

Therefore, since he had an afternoon to spare, he would call on Ramel.
He was determined to show him that he would never preserve the dignity
of a minister with him.

"Rue Boursault, Batignolles," he said to the coachman, lowering one of
the windows; "after that, only to the Bois!"

The coachman drove the coupe toward the right, reaching the outer
boulevards by way of Monceau Park.

Vaudrey was delighted. He was going to talk open-heartedly to an old
friend. Ah, Ramel! he was bent on remaining in the background, on being
nothing and loving his friends only when they were in defeat, as
Jeliotte had said. Well, Vaudrey would take him as his adviser. This
devil of a Ramel, this savage fellow should govern the state in spite of
himself.

The minister did not know Ramel's present lodging which he had occupied
only a short time. He expected to find dignified poverty and a cold
apartment. As soon as Denis opened the door to him, he found himself in
a workman's dwelling that had been transformed by artistic taste into
the small museum of a virtuoso. After having passed through a narrow
corridor, and climbed a small, winding staircase, Vaudrey rang at the
third floor of a little house in Rue Boursault and entered a well-kept
apartment full of sunlight.

Hanging on the walls were engravings and crayons in old-fa