Lemois shrugged his shoulders in laughter, and kept on with his work, painting a still-life picture on his table-top--a string of silver onions for high lights and a brace of pheasants with a background of green turnip-tops for darks. To see Lemois spread his marketing thus deliberately on his canvas of a kitchen table is a lesson in color and composition. You get, too, some idea as to why he was able to reproduce in real paint the "Bayeux" tapestry on the walls of the "Gallerie" and arrange the Marmouset as he has done. My ear next became aware of a certain silence in the direction of the coffee-roaster which had ceased its rhythm--the coffee is roasted fresh every morning. I glanced out and discovered our Mignon standing erect beside her roaster with flushed cheeks and dancing eyes. Next I caught sight of young Gaston, his bronze, weather-beaten face turned toward the girl, his eyes roaming around the court-yard. In his sunburned hand he clutched a letter. He was evidently inquiring of Mignon as to whom he should give it. "Who's it for?" shouted Louis, who, as godfather to Mignon's romance, had also been watching the little comedy in delight. "All private correspondence read by the cruel parent! I am the cruel parent--bring it over here! What!--not for me? Oh!--for the High-Muck-a-Muck." The shout now came over his left shoulder. "Here's a letter for you, High-Muck, from Marc, so this piscatorial Romeo announces. Shall I send it up?" "No--open and read it," I shouted back. Louis slit the envelope with his thumb-nail and absorbed its contents. "Well!--I'll be--No, I won't, but Marc ought. What do you think he's been and gone and done, the idiot!" "Give it up!" "Invited a friend of his--a young--the Marquise de la Caux--to dine with us to-night. Says she's the real thing and the most wonderful woman he knows. Doesn't that make your hair curl up backward! He's coming down with her in her motor--be here at seven precisely. A marquise! Well!--if that doesn't take the cake! I'll bet she's Marc's latest mash!" Herbert put his head out of an adjoining window. "What's the matter?" "Matter! Why that lunatic Marc is going to bring a woman down to dinner--one of those fine things from St. Germain. She's got a château above Buezval. Marc stayed there last night instead of showing up here." "Very glad of it, why not?" called Herbert, drawing in his head. Lemois, who had heard the entire outbreak, nodded to himself as if in assent, looked at Gaston for a moment, and, without adding a word of any kind, disappeared in the kitchen. What he thought of it all nobody knew.