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 who are said to put on masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle.  Having always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in finding its reflection here—­the fear of time beneath these painted cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the Marquise’s whole brave bearing—­rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling.  She wore her mask with absolute nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

“Eh, bien, monsieur?”

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued: 

“You’ve come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business.  I always tell them not to send me people, but to cable.  Why didn’t they cable?  They know I don’t like Americans coming here.  I’m pestered to death with them—­that is, I used to be—­and I should be still, if I didn’t put ’em down.”