On the following evening, when the dark was falling upon Paris, and the lamps began to bloom along the boulevards like flowers of fire, a little woman, simple, elderly, and timid, drove to the door of the mansion in the rue Adolph Yvon, and asked to see his lordship’s secretary. “He is from home, madam,” said the English servant, looking with curiosity at the homely figure. “From home!” she exclaimed, beset with fears, and realising now more poignantly than ever all the hazards of her scheme. “I must see him to-night; I am his mother.” “He is meantime with his lordship at the restaurant of Voisin,” said the domestic kindly. “Will you come in and wait for him?” “Thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed; “but, if it were possible, I should like to see him now.” He put her in a cab, and gave the name of Voisin to the driver. Voisin’s, in the rue Cambon, is a quiet and unpretentious restaurant, dear to aristocratic Paris, since it looks so cheap and really is expensive. So quiet, so discreet, so restrained externally, men from the rural parts have been known to go boldly in, misapprehending, and before they had recovered from the blinding radiance of its tables, ask for a brioche and a mug of beer. To-night it had, more speciously than usual, the aspect of a simple village inn: a hush prevailed; its waiters moved about on list, and spoke in whispers; le Pompadour écossais dined _en prince_ upstairs with a merry company, in a chamber upon which the whole attention of the house was concentrated, from M. le Gerant down to the meanest kitchen scullion, for the evening’s entertainment was upon a scale of reckless cost. Nothing would satisfy this wonderful man to-night but curious foods far-borne from foreign lands, strange rare beverages, golden vessels that had only once or twice been used in the Tuileries in the last days of the Empire. If diamonds could be crushed and turned by some miracle of alchemy into a palatable bouillon, he, or properly his secretary, would have cheerfully paid the cost. In an alcove screened by palms a string quartette played the most sensuous music, so exquisitely modulated that it seemed deliberately designed to harmonise with rallies of wit and peals of laughter. Mathilde, who sat to the right of the host, and by her saintly aspect seemed at times incongruous with that company of fashion’s fools, was for once silent, thoughtful, and demure. “You have not told me yet if I may hope,” said the Pompadour to her in a tender undertone, “and we disperse in less than twenty minutes.” “Hush!” she interrupted, with an impetuous jewelled hand upon his knee; “your friend has his eye on us! That man makes me afraid—he looks so cold, so supercilious! I hate to have a man regard me so who is convulsed with inside laughter, as you say; he looks—more like a conscience than a human secretary!”