in the
young man would be satisfied with a glance of curiosity.

The brief conversation to this effect having taken place before
luncheon, Madame de Melcourt pursued other aspects of the subject with
Colonel Ashley when that repast was ended and coffee was being served to
them in the library. Olivia having withdrawn to wait on her father,
Madame de Melcourt bade him light his cigar while she herself puffed
daintily at a cigarette. If she was a little grotesque in doing it, he
had seen more than one elderly Englishwoman who, in the same pastime,
was even more so.

Taking one thing with another, he liked his future great-aunt by
marriage. That is, he liked a connection that would bring him into touch
with such things in the world as he held to be important. While he had
the scorn natural to the Englishman of the Service class for anything
out of England that pretended to be an aristocracy, he admitted that the
old French royalist cause had claims to distinction. The atmosphere of
it clinging to one who was presumably in the heart of its counsels
restored him to that view of his marriage as an alliance between high
contracting powers which events in Boston had made so lamentably
untenable. If he was disconcerted, it was by her odd way of keeping him
at arm's-length.

"She doesn't like me, what?" he had more than once said to Olivia, and
with some misgiving.

Olivia could only answer: "I think she must. She's said a good many
times that you were chic and distinguished. That's a great deal for any
Englishman from her."

"She acts as if she had something up her sleeve."

That had become something like a conviction with him; but to-day he
flattered himself that he had made some progress in her graces. His own
spirits, too, were so high that he could be affable to Guion, who
appeared at table for the only time since the day of their first
meeting. Hollow-checked, hollow-eyed, his figure shrunken, and his
handsome hand grown so thin that the ring kept slipping from his finger,
Guion essayed, in view of his powerful relative's vindication--for so he
liked to think of it--to recapture some of his old elegance as a host.
To this Ashley lent himself with entire good-will, taking Guion's timid
claim for recognition as part of the new heaven and the new earth under
process of construction. In this greatly improved universe Olivia, too,
acquired in her lover's eyes a charm, a dignity, a softened grace beyond
anything he had dre