On leaving Vaudrey the previous night, Lissac had passed part of the night at his club on Place Vendome.  He had played and won.  He had gone to sleep over a fashionable novel, very faithfully written, but wearisome in the extreme, and he had awakened late and somewhat heavy-headed.  There were fringes of snow upon the window-sills and upon the house facing his little mansion.  The roofs were hidden under a large white sheet and half lost in the grayish-white background of the sky.

“Detestable weather!  So much the better,” thought Lissac, “I shall have no visitors.”

“I will see no one,” he said to his servant.  “In such weather no one but borrowers will come.”

He had just finished his dejeuner, plunging a Russian enamelled silver spoon into his egg, his tea smoking at his side in a burnished silver teapot with Japanese designs, when, notwithstanding his orders, the servant handed him a card written in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a note-book.

“It is not a borrower, monsieur!”

Guy seized the paper disdainfully, thinking, in spite of the servant’s opinion, that he would find the name of a beggar who had not even had his name printed on a piece of Bristol-board, and, adjusting his glass, he deciphered the fine writing on the paper; then after involuntarily exclaiming:  Ah! bah! and well! well! greatly astonished, he said as he rose: 

“Show her in!”

He had thrown on a chair his damask napkin of Muscovite pattern, and instinctively glanced at himself in the mirror, just as a coquette might do before a rendezvous, smoothing out his flannel vest and spreading out his cravat that only half-fastened the blue foulard collar of his dressing-gown.

At the moment that he was examining the folds made on his red leather slippers by his ample flannel trousers, a woman half-raised the satin portiere, and, standing within a frame formed by the folds of yellow satin, looked at the young man, displaying her brilliant teeth as she smilingly said: 

“Good-morning, Guy!”

Lissac went straight toward her with outstretched hands.

She allowed the large satin portiere to fall behind her, and after having permitted her little suede gloved hands to be raised for a moment, she boldly abandoned them to Guy, laughing the while, as they looked at each other face to face.  He betrayed some little astonishment, gazing at her as a person examines one whom one has not seen for a long time, and the young woman raised her head unabashed, displaying her features in full light, as if submitting to an inspection with confidence.

“You did not expect me, eh?”

“I confess—­”

“Doubtless it is a considerable time since you thought of me.”

Guy was inclined to bow and, as his only reply, to kiss the tips of her fingers; but he reflected that, since they last met, the parting of his brown locks had been devilishly widened, and he remained standing, answering with the conceit of a handsome man: