he first place.

"_Allez_, please," he said, earnestly, "and--_vite_."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came
back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a
large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had
returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a
yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a
Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy,
startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer
in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in
an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin,
black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and
wearing a knitted shawl--perhaps the mother of the three young people he
had just seen--came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs,
inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he
had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep
of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade,
struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last
to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and
lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library
through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts,
Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings--with views through the long
windows of the traffic on the Seine--when a little old lady appeared in
a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old
lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts
to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy,
youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as
well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a
quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves
blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the
Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which
poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The
face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a
chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of
things he had read of those Mongolian tribes w