t was he the incarnation
of Scaramouche. But sufficiently was he so ever to mask his true
feelings by an arresting gesture, his true thoughts by an effective
phrase. He was the actor always, a man ever calculating the effect he
would produce, ever avoiding self-revelation, ever concerned to overlay
his real character by an assumed and quite fictitious one. There was in
this something of impishness, and something of other things.

Nobody laughed now at his flippancy. He did not intend that anybody
should. He intended to be terrible; and he knew that the more flippant
and casual his tone, the more terrible would be its effect. He produced
exactly the effect he desired.

What followed in a place where feelings and practices had become what
they had become is not difficult to surmise. When the session rose,
there were a dozen spadassins awaiting him in the vestibule, and this
time the men of his own party were less concerned to guard him. He
seemed so entirely capable of guarding himself; he appeared, for all his
circumspection, to have so completely carried the war into the enemy's
camp, so completely to have adopted their own methods, that his fellows
scarcely felt the need to protect him as yesterday.

As he emerged, he scanned that hostile file, whose air and garments
marked them so clearly for what they were. He paused, seeking the man
he expected, the man he was most anxious to oblige. But M. de La Tour
d'Azyr was absent from those eager ranks. This seemed to him odd. La
Tour d'Azyr was Chabrillane's cousin and closest friend. Surely he
should have been among the first to-day. The fact was that La Tour
d'Azyr was too deeply overcome by amazement and grief at the utterly
unexpected event. Also his vindictiveness was held curiously in leash.
Perhaps he, too, remembered the part played by Chabrillane in the affair
at Gavrillac, and saw in this obscure Andre-Louis Moreau, who had
so persistently persecuted him ever since, an ordained avenger. The
repugnance he felt to come to the point, with him, particularly after
this culminating provocation, was puzzling even to himself. But it
existed, and it curbed him now.

To Andre-Louis, since La Tour was not one of that waiting pack, it
mattered little on that Tuesday morning who should be the next. The
next, as it happened, was the young Vicomte de La Motte-Royau, one of
the deadliest blades in the group.

On the Wednesday morning, coming again an hour or so late to the
As