“I think you had better go,” said Etta quietly.  She went toward the fire-place and rang the bell.

M. de Chauxville took up his hat and gloves.

“Of course,” he said coldly, his voice shaking with suppressed rage, “there is some reason for this.  There is, I presume, some one else—­some one has been interfering.  No one interferes with me with impunity.  I shall make it my business to find out who is this—­”

He did not finish:  for the door was thrown open by the butler, who announced: 

“Mr. Alexis.”

Paul came into the room with a bow toward De Chauxville, who was going out, and whom he knew slightly.

“I came back,” he said, “to ask what evening next week you are free.  I have a box for the ‘Huguenots.’”

Paul did not stay.  The thing was arranged in a few moments, and as he left the drawing-room he heard the wheels of De Chauxville’s carriage.

Etta stood for a moment when the door had closed behind the two men, looking at the portiere which had hidden them from sight, as if following them in thought.  Then she gave a little laugh—­a queer laugh that might have had no heart in it, or too much for the ordinary purposes of life.  She shrugged her shoulders and took up a magazine, with which she returned to the chair placed for her before the fire by Claude de Chauxville.

In a few minutes Maggie came into the room.  She was carrying a bundle of flannel.

“The weakest thing I ever did,” she said cheerfully, “was to join Lady Crewel’s working guild.  Two flannel petticoats for the young by Thursday morning.  I chose the young because the petticoats are so ludicrously small.”

“If you never do anything weaker than that,” said Etta, looking into the fire, “you will not come to much harm.”

“Perhaps not; what have you been doing—­something weaker?”

“Yes.  I have been quarrelling with M. de Chauxville.”

Maggie held up a petticoat by the selvage (which a male writer takes to be the lower hem), and looked at her cousin through the orifice intended for the waist of the young.

“If one could manage it without lowering one’s dignity,” she said, “I think that that is the best thing one could possibly do with M. de Chauxville.”

Etta had taken up the magazine again.  She was pretending to read it.

“Yes; but he knows too much—­about every-body,” she said.

CHAPTER VI

THE TALLEYRAND CLUB

It has been said of the Talleyrand Club that the only qualifications required for admittance to its membership are a frock-coat and a glib tongue.  To explain the whereabouts of the Talleyrand Club were only a work of supererogation.  Many hansom cabmen know it.  Hansom cabmen know more than they are credited with.

The Talleyrand, as its name implies, is a diplomatic club, but ambassadors and ministers enter not its portals.  They send their juniors.  Some of these latter are in the habit of stating that London is the hub of Europe and the Talleyrand smoking-room its grease-box.  Certain is it that such men as Claude de Chauxville, as Karl Steinmetz, and a hundred others who are or have been political scene-shifters, are to be found in the Talleyrand rooms.