The situation was happily chosen for privacy. The neighbourhood was not quite poor enough for a well-dressed man to be conspicuous, and not quite respectable enough to possess an organized social vehmgericht, while it was altogether off the track of the ordinary foreign outlaw. Such of his neighbours as had noticed his existence at all supposed the tenant of Chestnut-Tree House, known simply as “Monsieur,” to be a teacher of the French language, who had seen better days. The last supposition was not very wide of the mark, but the better days were those of the Count’s ancestors, real and fictitious. His great-grandfather, a wealthy furniture-maker, had conferred the title on himself in the confusion of the great Revolution, after the last of the true Des Louvres had perished by the guillotine. Similar occupations of vacant honours were too common at the time for this one to attract much attention, and the furniture-maker’s son, by a great display of zeal for the Bourbons and for Holy Church, had succeeded in firmly establishing his position in the aristocratic sphere. It was the grandson who had dissipated the family fortune, leaving the present Count only the inheritance of a good name. The merits of his ancestors, or his own Legitimist zeal, had secured for Des Louvres the patronage of the Pretender who passed as the Comte de Rouen, but whom the Count invariably referred to in private as His Most Christian Majesty Louis XIX. In the service of this personage Des Louvres filled a position half-way between that of a press-agent and a chargé d’affaires, supplying the English newspapers with paragraphs in the Count’s interest, and generally watching the course of events on his behalf. Des Louvres had made no mystery of these functions, but a certain obscurity hung over whatever other transactions he was engaged in. Some persons believed him to be in the employment of a Government celebrated for its elaborate secret police organized in every capital of the world; others suspected the Count of rendering services even less creditable to a certain foreign potentate, and hinted that the house in Chestnut-Tree Walk, if it could speak, would be able to tell some very strange stories indeed. Among these activities of Des Louvres which he took less pains to hide was his connection with the English Legitimists. It was he who kept them in touch with the more important organizations abroad--in France, in Spain, in Italy, and in Portugal. He cheered their flagging spirits, oppressed by the sense of their insignificance at home, by making them feel that the Guild was taken seriously on the Continent, and that they themselves were persons of note in Paris and Madrid. It brought consolation and refreshment to Egerton and Wickham Vane to know that their toy conspiracy bulked largely in the columns of such trusted organs of the Papacy as the _Osservatore Romano_ or the _Paris Univers_.