Happily for Fred, he took pleasure in the familiarity with which she treated him—­a familiarity which, had he known it, was not flattering.  He was in the seventh heaven for a whole fortnight, during which he was the recipient of more dried flowers and bows of ribbon than he ever got in all the rest of his life—­the American girls were very fond of giving keepsakes—­but then his star waned.  He was no longer the only one.  The grown-up brother of the Wermants came to Treport—­Raoul, with his air of a young man about town—­a boulevardier, with his jacket cut in the latest fashion, with his cockle-shell of a boat, which he managed as well on salt water as on fresh, sculling with his arms bare, a cigarette in his mouth, a monocle in his eye, and a pith-helmet, such as is worn in India.  The young ladies used to gather on the sands to watch him as he struck the water with the broad blade of his scull, near enough for them to see and to admire his nautical ability.  They thought all his jokes amusing, and they delighted in his way of seizing his partner for a waltz and bearing her off as if she were a prize, hardly allowing her to touch the floor.

Fred thought him, with his stock of old jokes, very ill-mannered.  He laughed at his sculling, and had a great mind to strike him after he saw him waltzing with Jacqueline.  But he had to acknowledge the general appreciation felt for the fellow whom he called vulgar.

Raoul Wermant did not stay long at Treport.  He had only come to see his sisters on his way to Dieppe, where he expected to meet a certain Leah Skip, an actress from the ‘Nouveautes’.  If he kept her waiting, however, for some days, it was because he was loath to leave the handsome Madame de Villegry, who was living near her friend Madame de Nailles, recruiting herself after the fatigues of the winter season.  Such being the situation, the young girls of the Blue Band might have tried in vain to make any impression upon him.  But the hatred with which he inspired Fred found some relief in the composition of fragments of melancholy verse, which the young midshipman hid under his mattresses.  It is not an uncommon thing for naval men to combine a love of the sea with a love of poetry.  Fred’s verses were not good, but they were full of dejection.  The poor fellow compared Raoul Wermant to Faust, and himself to Siebel.  He spoke of

        The youth whose eyes were brimming with salt tears,
        Whose heart was troubled by a thousand fears,
        Poor slighted lover!-since in his heavy heart
        All his illusions perish and depart.

Again, he wrote of Siebel: 

        O Siebel!—­thine is but the common fate! 
        They told thee Fortune upon youth would wait;
        ’Tis false when love’s in question-and you may—­

Here he enumerated all the proofs of tenderness possible for a woman to give her lover, and then he added: