"Dancing shoes!" said Joubert, putting the boots back. "Ah, yes; I forgot that monsieur was a dancer." "You forgot no such thing, for you know very well I do not dance, but one does not go to a ball in patent-leather boots. You like to fling my lameness in my face. You are turning into vinegar these times. I will pension you, and send you off to the country to live, if M. le Vicomte does not do what he has threatened to do." "And what may that be?" asked the old fellow, with the impudent air of a naughty child. "He says he'll put you and Beril in a sack and drop you in the Seine, if he has any more trouble with the pair of you--always fighting like a couple of old cats." "Old, indeed!" replied Joubert. "Ma foi! it well becomes a young man like the Vicomte to think of age! And did I make you lame? More likely it was a curse from one of that lot----" "Here!" I said, "give me the hair-brushes, and leave 'that lot,' as you call them alone." I wondered to myself what Joubert would have said had he known the real cause of my lameness, but I had never spoken to anyone of the child, so like little Carl, the mysterious child who had lured me through the bushes into the hidden gravel-pit. If I had, what ammunition it would have given him against "that lot," as he was pleased to call anyone who had been present at the Schloss Lichtenberg that September nine years ago! I dined tête-à-tête with my guardian, then we played a game of écarté; and at ten o'clock, the carriage being at the door, we departed for the Marquis d'Harmonville's in the Avenue Malakoff. It was a very big affair; the Avenue Malakoff was lined with carriages; and we, wedged between the carriage of the Countess de Pourtalès and that of the Russian Ambassador, had time on our hands, during which the Vicomte, irritated by the loss of five louis at écarté and the slowness of the queue, continued his strictures on the social life of Paris and the condition of France. We passed up the stairs, between a double bank of flowers; and despite the condition of the social life of Paris and the state of France, the scene was very lovely. The great ballroom--with its scheme of white and gold, its crystal candelabra and its extraordinarily beautiful ceiling, in which, as in a snowstorm, the ice spirits whirled in a fantastic dance--might have been the ballroom in the palace of the Ice Queen but for the warmth, the banks of white camellias, and the music of M. Strauss's band.