O'Hoolohan had learned this from a knot of premature cynics in the café of _la Jeune France_, where he had been in the habit of calling in among other gay resorts of the district to pick up what information he could on a matter that affected him much, for under his stone-like, soldierly exterior there were hidden springs of tenderness. The café which is called after young France is much affected by those promising pillars of the future, the students of law and medicine, especially the latter, who reside in the Latin Quarter of Paris. A light, varied of blue and red, blazes like a pharos over its portals to entice the customers. It lies to the right a few hundred yards up the Boulevard St. Michel, as it is entered from the side of the quays. Here may be seen congregated, after dinner-hour in the evening--under the warm chandeliers in the winter, out in the fresh air of the thoroughfare in the finer season--the future Berryers and Lamballes of the most civilized nation in the world. Only they do not look like it always, carelessly chatting behind their modest glasses of beer, often from amid the clouds of incense floating from cheap cigars, or the equally economic _caporal_ tobacco. A gay and spacious café it is; well lit, well furnished with softly-padded cushions, and lined with rows of mirrors reflecting the intellectual group around busily engaged wasting the hours in everything but the study of comparative anatomy or the subtleties of the Code Napoleon. Dominoes and picquet are more in vogue than jurisprudence, and the only books which are read by the novices of the learned professions who frequent the place are woman's looks, and folly--the loss of time and money--invariably all they teach them. The night before that on which O'Hoolohan paid his last visit to O'Hara's chambers, the soldier of fortune had sauntered into the café early, but it was almost deserted. It was the _mi-carême_, that oasis in mid-Lent for the Paris student, when he avenges himself for the enforced abstinence from his usual enjoyments by the indulgence in riot in the interval of saturnalia allowed by custom. The habitués of the Young France were not there. They were dancing merrily in one disguise or other at the ball-room higher up in the same boulevard, the Closerie des Lilas. Why, it may be asked, did not O'Hoolohan go to the ball-room where he had first seen her whose fate he was inquiring into? and why, knowing that she was dead, did he seek to know more?