That is the reason why he is the only one of all who enters this room worthy to sit in it." "You like Herbert, then?" I interrupted, knowing just what he would say. "How absurd, my dear friend! You like a filet, and a gown on a woman--but you don't like a man. You _love_ him--when he is a _man_!--and Monsieur Herbert is all that. It is the English in him which counts. Since he was fourteen years of age he has been roaming around the world doing everything a man could to make his bread--and he a gentleman born, with his father's house to go home to if he pleased. Yet he has been farm-hand, acrobat, hostler, sailor before the mast, newspaper reporter, next four years in Africa among the natives; then painter, and now, at forty-five, after only six years' practice, one of the great sculptors of France, with his work in the Luxembourg and the ribbon of the Legion in his button-hole! Have I not the right to say that he is a _man_? And one thing more: not for one moment has he ever lost the good heart and the fine manner of the gentleman. Ah! that is most extraordinary of all, when you think of the adventures and hair-breadth escapes and sufferings he has gone through! Did he ever tell you of his stealing a ride in Australia on a locomotive tender to get to Sydney, two hundred miles away?" I shook my head. "Well--get him to tell you. You will be so sorry for him, even now, that you cannot keep the tears from your eyes. Listen! There goes the scream of his horn--and I wager you, too, that he brings that delightful wild man, Monsieur Louis, with him." II THE WOOD FIRE AND ITS FRIENDS Two men burst in. Herbert, compact, wellknit, ruddy, simple in his bearing and manner; Louis, broad-shouldered, strong as a bull, and bubbling over with unrepressed merriment. Both were muffled to their chins--Herbert in his fur motor-coat, his cap drawn close over his steady gray eyes; Louis in his big sketching-cloak and hood and a pair of goggles which gave him so owlish a look that both Mignon and Leà broke out laughing at the sight. "Fifty miles an hour, High-Muck" (I am High-Muck) "this brute of a Herbert kept up. Everything went by in a blur; but for these gig-lamps I'd be stone blind." The brace and the snap of the crisp autumn air clinging to their clothes suddenly permeated the room as with electricity. Even slow-moving Lemois felt its vivifying current as he hurriedly dragged the Florentine nearer the fire. "See, Monsieur Herbert, the chair has been waiting for you. I have kept even Monsieur High-Muck out of it." "That's very good of you, Lemois," returned the sculptor as he handed Leà his coat and gloves and settled himself in its depths. "I'm glad to get back to it. What the chair thinks about it is another thing--make it tell you some time." "But it has--only last night one of the heads was saying----"