attracted me; and by way of opening the
conversation I spoke of the wildly beautiful scenery through which I had
passed on my way to the castle. It was a bad beginning.

"I see," she said, with a singular expression of irony, "that you are a
poet. You must talk about the forests and moorlands with Mlle. Helouin,
who also adores these things. For my part I do not love them."

"What is it, then, that you really love?" I said.

She gave me a supercilious look and said, in a hard voice, "Nothing,
sir."

I must confess I was hurt. I could not see that I had done anything to
lay myself open to so harsh an answer. No doubt I was only a servant.
But why had she come and sat beside me if she did not want to talk? I
was glad when the dinner was over and we went into the drawing-room.
Madame Laroque, the widowed mother of Marguerite, began to ask M.
Bevallan about the new opera in Paris; he was unable to reply, so, as I
had seen the work in Italy before it was produced in France, I gave her
a description of it. I am afraid I forgot myself with Madame Laroque--a
fine-looking, cultivated woman of forty years of age. Flattered by the
way in which she treated me entirely as her equal, I insensibly glided
from theatrical topics to fashionable gossip, and just stopped in time
in an anecdote about my tour in Russia. A few more words and she would
have learnt that her humble steward, Maxime Odiot--as I am now called--
was a man with very aristocratic connections.

In order to hide my embarrassment, I moved towards the table where some
of the guests were playing whist. This led to my committing a blunder
which, I fear, may make my position a difficult one. Among the whist-
players was a Mlle. de Porhoet-Gael, eighty-eight years of age and full
of strange crotchets. The last descendant of the noblest of Breton
families, she lived, so Madame Laroque told me, on an income of forty
pounds a year, her fortune having been spent in vainly fighting for the
succession to a great estate in Spain. She was talking about it to her
partner when I came up.

"The estate belongs to me," she was saying. "My father told me so a
hundred times, and the persons who are trying to take it from me have no
more connection with my family than this handsome young gentleman has."

And she designated me with a look and a movement of her head. No doubt
she did not mean to imply that because I was a steward I was of mean
birth; but I was stung by her remark, and f