At a little table in the Café de Foy, once a Revolutionary, now a Royalist resort, the Vicomte de Saint-Ermay sat the next morning and waited for his cousin. The busy life of the Palais-Royal went on about him, but for once he seemed oblivious of it; he even looked a little grave. Louis de Chantemerle had worn all his life a very subtle disguise—an impenetrable armour of gaiety, more baffling than gravity, over an extreme reserve. To call his customary outer self a disguise at all is perhaps misleading, for that self went much deeper. He was really what he appeared to be, careless, pleasure-loving, airily indifferent. But the reserve was there, and it was the very mocking frankness which he so successfully opposed to all attempts at its exhumation which proved his concern that his soul should be decently covered up. Few things were not to him objects of raillery, and the most worthy objects and individuals had an unhappy knack of presenting themselves to him in a ludicrous light. Nature had given him parts with a temperament which forbade him to make use of them; he had too much wit, in fact, to be anything but a fine gentleman. And yet all these sterile qualities were counterbalanced by his charm; not the charm of manner which, with his personal beauty, his birth and his gifts, had served him so well in his own path of life, but an attraction less easy of definition. In a life of light-hearted self-indulgence, of a fastidious but by no means innocent pursuit of pleasure, Louis had somehow preserved a singular inward untaintedness. He had some claims to the name of profligate; no moralist could easily have been confuted who had called him a rake, a gambler, a spendthrift, or a duellist. He was headstrong, wayward, and indolent, extremely obstinate at times, and excessively easy-going at others. Save for one notable exception, now six months old, he had invariably done what he pleased. With all this, he had kept the heart of a boy—if of a naughty boy—and a fascination for which, as M. des Graves had once said, an evangelist might have prayed in vain.