“That implacable brute Allegre followed them down ceremoniously and put my mother into the fiacre at the door with the greatest deference.  He didn’t open his lips though, and made a great bow as the fiacre drove away.  My mother didn’t recover from her consternation for three days.  I lunch with her almost daily and I couldn’t imagine what was the matter.  Then one day . . .”

He glanced round the table, jumped up and with a word of excuse left the studio by a small door in a corner.  This startled me into the consciousness that I had been as if I had not existed for these two men.  With his elbows propped on the table Mills had his hands in front of his face clasping the pipe from which he extracted now and then a puff of smoke, staring stolidly across the room.

I was moved to ask in a whisper: 

“Do you know him well?”

“I don’t know what he is driving at,” he answered drily.  “But as to his mother she is not as volatile as all that.  I suspect it was business.  It may have been a deep plot to get a picture out of Allegre for somebody.  My cousin as likely as not.  Or simply to discover what he had.  The Blunts lost all their property and in Paris there are various ways of making a little money, without actually breaking anything.  Not even the law.  And Mrs. Blunt really had a position once—­in the days of the Second Empire—­and so. . .”

I listened open-mouthed to these things into which my West-Indian experiences could not have given me an insight.  But Mills checked himself and ended in a changed tone.

“It’s not easy to know what she would be at, either, in any given instance.  For the rest, spotlessly honourable.  A delightful, aristocratic old lady.  Only poor.”

A bump at the door silenced him and immediately Mr. John Blunt, Captain of Cavalry in the Army of Legitimity, first-rate cook (as to one dish at least), and generous host, entered clutching the necks of four more bottles between the fingers of his hand.

“I stumbled and nearly smashed the lot,” he remarked casually.  But even I, with all my innocence, never for a moment believed he had stumbled accidentally.  During the uncorking and the filling up of glasses a profound silence reigned; but neither of us took it seriously—­any more than his stumble.

“One day,” he went on again in that curiously flavoured voice of his, “my mother took a heroic decision and made up her mind to get up in the middle of the night.  You must understand my mother’s phraseology.  It meant that she would be up and dressed by nine o’clock.  This time it was not Versoy that was commanded for attendance, but I. You may imagine how delighted I was. . . .”