“You were kind enough to permit me to pay my respects to you, madame,” said the young man, walking up to Berthe, with his hat in both hands, and blushing violently while he doubled himself in two before her. “I hope I am not indiscreet in availing myself so precipitately of the permission?” Berthe smiled her gracious clemency on the indiscretion, and the gentleman, backing a few steps, carried his hat toward a group of politicians who were shaking hands in the window, and making appointments before separating. “How extraordinary!” muttered Berthe, laughing to herself at the cool audacity of Monsieur de Chassedot. “I was kind enough to permit him! Perhaps he is under delusion, and mistakes somebody else’s permission for mine. Or perhaps it is a ruse of his mother’s to put him unawares in the way of the three millions?” But Berthe was wrong. M. de Chassedot really had said something to her between the links of the “ladies’ chain” about placing himself at her feet, and, as she looked very smiling and gracious, he took the smiles for a permission. He had no view in asking it beyond that of being received in the _salon_ of the fashionable beauty, and he was encouraged in presenting himself there by the knowledge that he was sure not to meet his mother. It would be a free territory where he might flit about without being in perpetual dread of falling into some net which the maternal solicitude was constantly setting for him in the _salons_ of her devoted allies. Madame de Beaucœur did not count amongst those redoubtable beligerents. When she called during the day at his mother’s house, he was never there, and, as the _habitués_ of the marquise’s Tuesday evenings were recruited chiefly amongst the old fogies and devotees of the faubourg, a class of her fellow-creatures whom Madame de Beaucœur carefully avoided, there was no chance of his meeting her there in the evening. It was this precisely that made her mediation so precious to Madame de Chassedot. Edgar was disarmed before her; he did not mistrust her, and when, reconnoitring the company in the adjoining room through the broad glass-panel that divided the _salon_, he spied her sitting near a very pretty girl, the discovery gave him no shock, and, when Madame de Beaucœur, catching his eye, nodded familiarly to him, he at once made his way toward her, and took up a position behind her chair. “I should like to go very much,” Madame de Beaucœur said, continuing the conversation with Madame de Galliac, “but I have not been this year since the garden opened. One cannot go without a gentleman, and M. de Beaucœur is always so busy in the evening that he can never accompany me.” “There are hundreds who would cross swords for the honor of replacing him, madame,” declared M. de Chassedot, stooping over her chair, and throwing all the _empressement_ into his voice and manner that her position as a married woman rendered legitimate.