He was on his way to Paris when (as he recorded in his journal) a light came into his life.  This illumination first shone for him by means of one Cooley, son and inheritor of all that had belonged to the late great Cooley, of Cooley Mills, Connecticut.  Young Cooley, a person of cheery manners and bright waistcoats, was one of Mellin’s few sea-acquaintances; they had played shuffleboard together on the steamer during odd half-hours when Mr. Cooley found it possible to absent himself from poker in the smoking-room; and they encountered each other again on the channel boat crossing to Calais.

"Hey!" was Mr. Cooley’s lively greeting.  “I’m meetin’ lots of people I know to-day.  You runnin’ over to Paris, too?  Come up to the boat-deck and meet the Countess de Vaurigard.”

“Who?” said Mellin, red with pleasure, yet fearing that he did not hear aright.

“The Countess de Vaurigard.  Queen! met her in London.  Sneyd introduced me to her.  You remember Sneyd on the steamer?  Baldish Englishman—­red nose—­doesn’t talk much—­younger brother of Lord Rugden, so he says.  Played poker some.  Well, yes!”

“I saw him.  I didn’t meet him.”

“You didn’t miss a whole lot.  Fact is, before we landed I almost had him sized up for queer, but when he introduced me to the Countess I saw my mistake.  He must be the real thing. She certainly is!  You come along up and see.”

So Mellin followed, to make his bow before a thin, dark, charmingly pretty young woman, who smiled up at him from her deck-chair through an enhancing mystery of veils; and presently he found himself sitting beside her.  He could not help trembling slightly at first, but he would have giving a great deal if, by some miraculous vision, Mary Kramer and other friends of his in Cranston could have seen him engaged in what he thought of as “conversational badinage” with the Comtesse de Vaurigard.

Both the lady and her name thrilled him.  He thought he remembered the latter in Froissart:  it conjured up “baronial halls” and “donjon keeps,” rang resonantly in his mind like “Let the portcullis fall!” At home he had been wont to speak of the “oldest families in Cranston,” complaining of the invasions of “new people” into the social territory of the McCords and Mellins and Kramers—­a pleasant conception which the presence of a De Vaurigard revealed to him as a petty and shameful fiction; and yet his humility, like his little fit of trembling, was of short duration, for gay geniality of Madame de Vaurigard put him amazingly at ease.

At Calais young Cooley (with a matter-of-course air, and not seeming to feel the need of asking permission) accompanied her to a compartment, and Mellin walked with them to the steps of the coach, where he paused, murmuring some words of farewell.

Madame de Vaurigard turned to him with a prettily assumed dismay.

“What!  You stay at Calais?” she cried, pausing with one foot on the step to ascend.  “Oh!  I am sorry for you.  Calais is ter-rible!”