invariably held aloof.  It was servants’ hall gossip that the relations existing between father and son were based upon the coldest formalities.  Conversation never went farther than “Good morning, Monsieur le Marquis” and “Good morning, Monsieur le Comte.”  The marquis pretended not to understand when any referred to his son as the “Chevalier du Cevennes.”  It was also gossiped that this noble house was drawing to its close; for the Chevalier had declined to marry, and was drinking and gaming heavily; and to add to the marquis’s chagrin, the Chevalier had been dismissed from court, in disgrace,—­a calamity which till now had never fallen upon the House of Perigny.

The marquis was growing old.  As he sat before the fire in the grand salon, the flickering yellow light playing over his features, which had a background of moving, deep velvet-brown shadows, he might have been the theme of some melancholy whim by Rubens, a stanza by Dante.  His face was furrowed like a frosty road.  Veins sprawled over his hands which rested on the arms of his chair, and the knuckles shone like ivory through the drawn transparent skin.  The long fingers drummed ceaselessly and the head teetered; for thus senility approaches.  His lips, showing under a white mustache, were livid and fallen inward.  The large Alexandrian nose had lost its military angle, and drooped slightly at the tip:  which is to say, the marquis no longer acted, he thought; he was no longer the soldier, but the philosopher.  The domineering, forceful chin had the essentials of a man of justice, but it was lacking in that quality of mercy which makes justice grand.  Over the Henri IV ruff fell the loose flesh of his jaws.  Altogether, it was the face of a man who was practically if not actually dead.  But in the eyes, there lay the life of the man.  From under jutting brows they peered as witnesses of a brain which had accumulated a rare knowledge of mankind, man’s shallowness, servility, hypocrisy, his natural inability to obey the simplest laws of nature; a brain which was set in motion always by calculation, never by impulse.  They were grey eyes, bold and fierce and liquid as a lion’s.  None among the great had ever beaten them down, for they were truthful eyes, almost an absolute denial of the life he had lived.  But truth to the marquis was not a moral obligation.  He was truthful as became a great noble who was too proud and fearless of consequences to lie.  In his youth he had been called Antinous to Henri’s Caesar; but there is a certain type of beauty which, if preyed upon by vices, becomes sardonic in old age.

At his elbow stood a small Turkish table on which were a Venetian bell and a light repast, consisting of a glass of weakened canary and a plate of biscuits spread sparingly with honey.  Presently the marquis drank the wine and struck the bell.  Jehan, the marquis’s aged valet, entered soon after with a large candelabrum of wax candles.  This he placed on the mantel.  Even with this additional light, the other end of the salon remained in semi-darkness.  Only the dim outline of the grand staircase could be seen.