Thereafter he fenced with the Vicomte, who was perhaps the ablest of his pupils at the time, and all the while his thoughts were on the heights of Meudon, his mind casting up the lessons he had to give that afternoon and on the morrow, and wondering which of these he might postpone without deranging the academy.  When having touched the Vicomte three times in succession, he paused and wrenched himself back to the present, it was to marvel at the precision to be gained by purely mechanical action.  Without bestowing a thought upon what he was doing, his wrist and arm and knees had automatically performed their work, like the accurate fighting engine into which constant practice for a year and more had combined them.

Not until Sunday was Andre-Louis able to satisfy a wish which the impatience of the intervening days had converted into a yearning.  Dressed with more than ordinary care, his head elegantly coiffed — by one of those hairdressers to the nobility of whom so many were being thrown out of employment by the stream of emigration which was now flowing freely — Andre-Louis mounted his hired carriage, and drove out to Meudon.

The house of the younger Kercadiou no more resembled that of the head of the family than did his person.  A man of the Court, where his brother was essentially a man of the soil, an officer of the household of M. le Comte d’Artois, he had built for himself and his family an imposing villa on the heights of Meudon in a miniature park, conveniently situated for him midway between Versailles and Paris, and easily accessible from either.  M. d’Artois — the royal tennis-player — had been amongst the very first to emigrate.  Together with the Condes, the Contis, the Polignacs, and others of the Queen’s intimate council, old Marshal de Broglie and the Prince de Lambesc, who realized that their very names had become odious to the people, he had quitted France immediately after the fall of the Bastille.  He had gone to play tennis beyond the frontier — and there consummate the work of ruining the French monarchy upon which he and those others had been engaged in France.  With him, amongst several members of his household went Etienne de Kercadiou, and with Etienne de Kercadiou went his family, a wife and four children.  Thus it was that the Seigneur de Gavrillac, glad to escape from a province so peculiarly disturbed as that of Brittany — where the nobles had shown themselves the most intransigent of all France - had come to occupy in his brother’s absence the courtier’s handsome villa at Meudon.

That he was quite happy there is not to be supposed.  A man of his almost Spartan habits, accustomed to plain fare and self-help, was a little uneasy in this sybaritic abode, with its soft carpets, profusion of gilding, and battalion of sleek, silent-footed servants — for Kercadiou the younger had left his entire household behind.  Time, which at Gavrillac he had kept so fully employed in agrarian concerns, here