M. de Mauves, as if hating to seem preoccupied, took up the evening paper to help himself to seem indifferent. As he glanced over it he threw off some perfunctory allusion to the crisis--the political--which enabled Longmore to reply with perfect veracity that, with other things to think about, he had had no attention to spare for it. And yet our hero was in truth far from secure against rueful reflexion. The Count’s ruffled state was a comfort so far as it pointed to the possibility that the lady in the coupe might be proving too many for him; but it ministered to no vindictive sweetness for Longmore so far as it should perhaps represent rising jealousy. It passed through his mind that jealousy is a passion with a double face and that on one of its sides it may sometimes almost look generous. It glimmered upon him odiously M. de Mauves might grow ashamed of his political compact with his wife, and he felt how far more tolerable it would be in future to think of him as always impertinent than to think of him as occasionally contrite. The two men pretended meanwhile for half an hour to outsit each other conveniently; and the end--at that rate--might have been distant had not the tension in some degree yielded to the arrival of a friend of M. de Mauves--a tall pale consumptive-looking dandy who filled the air with the odour of heliotrope. He looked up and down the boulevard wearily, examined the Count’s garments in some detail, then appeared to refer restlessly to his own, and at last announced resignedly that the Duchess was in town. M. de Mauves must come with him to call; she had abused him dreadfully a couple of evenings before--a sure sign she wanted to see him. “I depend on you,” said with an infantine drawl this specimen of an order Longmore felt he had never had occasion so intimately to appreciate, “to put her en train.” M. de Mauves resisted, he protested that he was d’une humeur massacrante; but at last he allowed himself to be drawn to his feet and stood looking awkwardly--awkwardly for M. de Mauves--at Longmore. “You’ll excuse me,” he appeared to find some difficulty in saying; “you too probably have occupation for the evening?” “None but to catch my train.” And our friend looked at his watch. “Ah you go back to Saint-Germain?” “In half an hour.” M. de Mauves seemed on the point of disengaging himself from his companion’s arm, which was locked in his own; but on the latter’s uttering some persuasive murmur he lifted his hat stiffly and turned away.