It was some time since the Marquis had visited his cousin’s apartments, and his never-failing sensation of having strayed by mistake into those of a member of the other sex fell on him more strongly than usual. Yet Madame de Château-Foix, though by no means indifferent to her surroundings, had not, in her spacious bed-chamber at home, a quarter of the silk and satin luxury which reigned in her nephew’s room in Paris. Her toilet-table was not so garnished with costly appurtenances, nor, in the country, was it possible to supply her all the year round with roses. She had indeed recently replaced her huge four-poster, solemn as the tomb and potentially quite as airless, by the more fashionable bed of the time, with its drapery falling from one central point. But—whether inspired by hygienic or æsthetic considerations—her nephew reposed in a couch at once more elegant and more airy than either. The slender fluted pillars which supported the brocaded tester, and whose gilt was now toned down to exactly the requisite paleness, the curtains of thin silk-apple-green and white deftly caught to them by cords which were obviously but rarely untied, the fine lace-bordered sheets and embroidered coverlet—whereon, too, there slumbered at the moment a magnificent Persian cat—might very well have enshrined some much-courted beauty of the last reign. Possibly they had done so, for at the head was stretched a delicate vista of painted silk covered with fluttering trains of doves and laughing Cupids and butterflies, of which the lowest cherub had the effect of balancing himself on the curved rim of the gilded woodwork immediately above the pillows, while from his plump fingers a slow rain of the palest poppies floated down, presumably upon the sleeper’s head. A group of his fellows, sustaining themselves in their downward flight on ludicrously inadequate pinions, tendered him fresh garlands of the flowers. The exquisite handling of this embellishment, more than atoning for the artificiality of its design, might almost have surprised a spectator into an expectation of seeing, somewhere on the bed below it, one or two of the smooth and shining poppy petals. The present critic, however, saw nothing there beyond his kinsman’s brown curls—which still bore traces of last night’s powder—tossing on a broad pillow edged with Valenciennes. Their owner did not look in the least sleepy, and at once jerked himself with alacrity from his recumbent position on to his right elbow. “Good-morning!” he exclaimed. “I did not expect you so early. Jasmin, set a chair for Monsieur le Marquis, and bring some chocolate.”