She laughed like an actress. She shook her finger at him archly. “Of a truth,” she replied, “they cannot have been to your stomach at all. You asked for bread, was it not, and they gave you a shower of stones? One does not desire one’s high convictions to be set up for a mark to violence. And so you turned the tail and came home to our dear monseigneur.” “I have come home to England,” said Ned. “As to this, my happening on my lord, it is a simple accident.” He spoke with some coldness of reserve. He had no idea whom he addressed. His kinsman had disdained to introduce him or to give him the least clue to madame’s identity. The lady laughed again. “But do not call it a _contretemps_!” she cried. “It is a dispensation of Providence that milord, though a very Bayard of courage, is detained by sentiments of chivalry. We were to have journeyed to Paris together had news of the riots not reached us; and hence arrives this so amiable meeting.” “I was there,” said Ned shortly. “I saw M. Reveillon’s factory gutted.” She paused in her fanning. She looked strangely at the young man a moment. “You were there?” Then she resumed her bantering tone: “and found what bad bed-fellows are theory and practice. Perhaps it shall reconcile you to milord here, whose _rôle_ of orthodox _muscadin_ you shall for the henceforth make your own.” “Egad!” cried the viscount, who, it seemed, accepted the revolutionary _muscadin_ for better than it was worth. “But I had my fill of riots in ’80, when the cursed rabble took me for a papist and singed my coat-tails.” Madame nodded her head brightly. Her dark eyes contrasted as startlingly with her overlaid cheeks as might the eyes in a face of wax. “So you were wise and came away,” she said, still addressing the young man. “But milord was wiser. He would not help to inflame a popular prejudice. The majesty of the people must be respected--when it takes to singeing one’s coat-tails.” “Well,” thought Ned, “I must be right. This is Madame Cocotte from the Palais Royal. Or else--I wonder if she is in the pay of a very neighbouring government?” A thought or two--of madame’s manner of presenting her little sarcasms--quickened his curiosity. To countermine the supposed agencies of Pitt, the inflexible and reserved, the bottomless Pitt--was it unreasonable to suppose that France was employing some very engaging decoy-ducks to the corruption of an aristocracy that might be fifth-cousins to State secrets? True, Monseigneur the Viscount’s confidence was of little worth but to his valet; yet the first rung of the ladder may be used for the secondary purpose of scraping one’s boots on before climbing. Madame was the only guest. She had brought her monkey with her, and the little brute was carried screeching to a chair by her side at the dinner-table, where it sat sucking its thumb like a vindictive baby and snatching at the dishes of fruit.