A moment later the volume was again in her lap. Gilbert was reading to the priest a portion of the letter which he held in his hand. He was too far away for Madame de Château-Foix to hear the words, yet a frown of impatience creased her brow, for she knew from whom the letter came. For perhaps the hundredth time she was submerged in the bewildering rush of affection and annoyance, familiar enough in the years that had passed since Louis de Saint-Ermay had come to amaze them with his naughtiness and hold them captive with his audacious joy. She was as sure as if she had read it that his letter was the harbinger of annoyance. And Gilbert would give him his time and his advice, just as in old days he had given up to him his toys. Life, it seemed, was consistently unfair—always ready to heap fresh gifts on the spoilt child. Louis had always had what he wanted, and there were always to be found persons holding that ridiculous opinion enunciated years ago by M. des Graves—that it was good for him to be happy. And what sort of happiness was his? The Marquise had never closely enquired into the manner of the Vicomte’s life in Paris, but she had every reason to believe that he amused himself somewhat over-well. His modest estate near Poitiers was hopelessly mortgaged; she suspected Gilbert of having more than once paid his debts for him. Now that the King’s constitutional guard, the successor of the bodyguard, had been disbanded also, she might have wondered what kept him still in Paris, had she not known his fervid loyalty—and that, too, of a type rather rare when almost every extreme Royalist conceived it to be his duty to emigrate. This devotion Madame de Château-Foix considered to be the best thing she knew about her nephew; she set it over against his unconquerable levity and extravagance. It was not, in her eyes, a count against him that his reckless temper sometimes got the better of the nonchalant frivolity beneath which it was buried, for she infinitely preferred the volcanic to the surface stratum. He had, for instance, as a _garde-du-corps_, been at Versailles on the great night of the 5th of October 1789, and, so far as his family had been able to elicit, had had on that occasion a narrow escape of sharing the fate of his massacred comrades, MM. de Varicourt and Deshuttes. The Marquis de Lafayette told Gilbert that his cousin was only saved from the effects of an entirely useless defiance of the mob, as the whole cortège started the next day for Paris, by a fishwife from the Halles, who threw her arms round him and declared that no one should touch _un si bel enfant_. The Vicomte always denied this tale, which was galling to his dignity—for what youth of twenty-three (as he then was) is pleased to be termed a child?—and doubly so because, in common with most of the extreme Royalists, he hated and distrusted the narrator. When Château-Foix first asked him about it, he replied that the