He stopped the carriage and I got in.  He pointed ahead toward a curtain of trees which screened the chateau.

“Paris,” I answered.

“Paris,” he repeated to the postilion, and we turned about.  I looked from hill to stream, from the fruited brambles of blackberry to reaches of noble forest, realizing that I should never see those lands again, or the neighboring crest where my friend the marquis slept.

We posted the distance to Paris in two days.

What the country was like or what towns we passed I could not this hour declare with any certainty.  At first making effort and groping numbly in my mind, but the second day grasping determination, I formed my plans, and talked them over with Skenedonk.  We would sail for America on the first convenient ship; waiting in Paris only long enough to prepare for the post journey to a port.  Charges must at once be settled with Doctor Chantry, who would willingly stay in Paris while the De Chaumonts remained there.

Beyond the voyage I did not look.  The first faint tugging of my foster country began to pull me as it has pulled many a broken wretch out of the conditions of the older world.

Paris was horrible, with a lonesomeness no one could have foreseen in its crowded streets.  A taste of war was in the air.  Troops passed to review.  Our post-carriage met the dashing coaches of gay young men I knew, who stared at me without recognition.  Marquis du Plessy no longer made way for me and displayed me at his side.

I drove to his hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain for my possessions.  It was closed:  the distant relative who inherited after him being an heir with no Parisian tastes.  The care-taker, however, that gentle old valet like a woman, who had dressed me in my first Parisian finery, let us in, and waited upon us with food I sent him out to buy.  He gave me a letter from my friend, which he had held to deliver on my return, in case any accident befell the marquis.  He was tremulous in his mourning, and all his ardent care of me was service rendered to the dead.

I sat in the garden, with the letter spread upon the table where we had dined.  Its brevity was gay.  The writer would have gone under the knife with a jest.  He did not burden me with any kind of counsel.  We had touched.  We might touch again.  It was as if a soul sailed by, waving its hat.

“My Dear Boy:—­

“I wanted you, but it was best you should not stay and behold the depravity of your elders.  It is about a woman.

“May you come to a better throne than the unsteady one of France.

“Your friend and servant,
Etienne du Plessy.

“Garlic is the spice of life, my boy!”

I asked no questions about the affair in which he had been engaged.  If he had wanted me to know he would have told me.

The garden was more than I could endure.  I lay down early and slept late, as soon as I awoke in the morning beginning preparation for leaving France.  Yet two days passed, for we were obliged to exchange our worn post-carriage for another after waiting for repairs.  The old valet packed my belongings; though I wondered what I was going to do with them in America.  The outfit of a young man of fashion overdressed a refugee of diminished fortune.