On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man with a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry sabre—­and all around him a landscape of savage mountains.  He caught my eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut.  (There were no inane snapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance for the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.

Just then some masks from outside invaded the cafe, dancing hand in hand in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose.  He gambolled in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between the chairs and tables:  eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces, breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.

They were people of the poorer sort (white calico with red spots, costumes), but amongst them there was a girl in a black dress sewn over with gold half moons, very high in the neck and very short in the skirt.  Most of the ordinary clients of the cafe didn’t even look up from their games or papers.  I, being alone and idle, stared abstractedly.  The girl costumed as Night wore a small black velvet mask, what is called in French a “loup.”  What made her daintiness join that obviously rough lot I can’t imagine.  Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined prettiness.

They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze and throwing her body forward out of the wriggling chain shot out at me a slender tongue like a pink dart.  I was not prepared for this, not even to the extent of an appreciative “Tres foli,” before she wriggled and hopped away.  But having been thus distinguished I could do no less than follow her with my eyes to the door where the chain of hands being broken all the masks were trying to get out at once.  Two gentlemen coming in out of the street stood arrested in the crush.  The Night (it must have been her idiosyncrasy) put her tongue out at them, too.  The taller of the two (he was in evening clothes under a light wide-open overcoat) with great presence of mind chucked her under the chin, giving me the view at the same time of a flash of white teeth in his dark, lean face.  The other man was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly shoulders.  He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for it seemed too tight for his powerful frame.

That man was not altogether a stranger to me.  For the last week or so I had been rather on the look-out for him in all the public places where in a provincial town men may expect to meet each other.  I saw him for the first time (wearing that same grey ready-made suit) in a legitimist drawing-room where, clearly, he was an object of interest, especially to the women.  I had caught his name as Monsieur Mills.  The lady who had introduced me took the earliest opportunity to murmur into my ear:  “A relation of Lord X.” (Un proche parent de Lord X.) And then she added, casting up her eyes:  “A good friend of the King.”  Meaning Don Carlos of course.