The smoking-room and play-room were closed by a cheerful dining-room, where eight persons (the number to which the guests were rigidly confined when there was a first-class dinner) had often appreciated the excellence of the cook, and the no less high merit of the wine of the vicomte, before they faced him at some high game of whist for five or six hundred louis, or shook the noisy dice-box at infernal hazard or roulette. These two widely opposite shades of M. de Saint-Remy disclosed, the reader will follow us into the regions below, to the very comfortable apartment of Edwards Patterson, the master of the horse of M. de Saint-Remy, who had invited M. Boyer to breakfast. A very pretty English maid-servant having withdrawn after she had brought in the silver teapot, these two worthies remained alone. Edwards was about forty years of age, and never did more skilful or stouter coachman make a seat groan under his most imposing rotundity; never did powdered wig enclose a more rubicund visage; and never did a more knowing and competent driver hold in his four fingers and thumb the reins of a four-in-hand. As good a judge of a horse as Tattersal (and in his youth he had been as good a trainer as the old and celebrated Chiffney), Edwards had been to the vicomte a most excellent coachman, and a man perfectly capable of superintending the training of race-horses on which he had betted heavily. When he did not assume his sumptuous brown and silver livery on the emblazoned hammercloth of his box, Edwards very much resembled an honest English farmer; and it is under this aspect that we shall present him to the reader, adding, at the same time, that beneath this round and red visage there lurked all the pitiless and devilish cunning of the horse-dealer. M. Boyer, his guest, the confidential servant of the vicomte, was a tall, thin man, with gray, smooth hair, bald forehead, cunning glance, with a countenance calm, discreet, and reserved. He expressed himself in somewhat choice phraseology, with polite, easy manners; he was tolerably well informed, his political opinions being legitimist, and he could take his part as first violin in an amateur quartette. From time to time, and with the best air in the world, he took a pinch of snuff from a gold snuff-box, set around with fine pearls, after which he negligently shook with the back of his hand (as white and carefully attended to as his master's) the particles of snuff from the frill of his fine Holland shirt. "Do you know, my dear Edwards," said Boyer, "that your maid, Betty, really does your meals in a very fair manner! _Ma foi!_ now and then one gets tired of high living." "The fact is that Betty is a very good girl," said Edwards, who spoke very good French. "I shall take her with me into my establishment, if I make up my mind to set up in housekeeping; and on this point, since we are alone, my dear Boyer, let us talk of business matters which you know as well as I do."