This time, when the doctor said to Joe: "Place Vendome," the horse, as if he understood that they were going to call on the Nabob, proudly shook his shining curb, and the coupe drove away at full speed, transforming the hub of each of its wheels into a gleaming sun. "To come such a distance to meet with such a reception! One of the celebrities of the day treated so by that Bohemian! This comes of trying to do good!" Jenkins vented his wrath in a long monologue in that vein; then suddenly exclaimed with a shrug: "Oh! pshaw!" And such traces of care as remained on his brow soon vanished on the pavement of Place Vendome. On all sides the clocks were striking twelve in the sunshine. Emerging from her curtain of mist, fashionable Paris, awake and on her feet, was beginning her day of giddy pleasure. The shop-windows on Rue de la Paix shone resplendent. The mansions on the square seemed to be drawn up proudly in line for the afternoon receptions; and, at the end of Rue Castiglione with its white arcades, the Tuileries, in the glorious sunlight of winter, marshalled its shivering statues, pink with cold, among the leafless quincunxes. II. A BREAKFAST ON PLACE VENDOME. There were hardly more than a score of persons that morning in the Nabob's dining-room, a dining-room finished in carved oak, supplied only the day before from the establishment of some great house-furnisher, who furnished at the same time the four salons which could be seen, one beyond the other, through an open door: the hangings, the objects of art, the chandeliers, even the plate displayed on the sideboards, even the servants who served the breakfast. It was the perfect type of the establishment improvised, immediately upon alighting from the railway train, by a parvenu of colossal wealth, in great haste to enjoy himself. Although there was no sign of a woman's dress about the table, no bit of light and airy material to enliven the scene, it was by no means monotonous, thanks to the incongruity, the nondescript character of the guests, gathered together from all ranks of society, specimens of mankind culled from every race in France, in Europe, in the whole world, from top to bottom of the social scale. First of all, the master of the house, a sort of giant--sunburned, swarthy, with his head between his shoulders--to whom his short nose, lost in the puffiness of the face, his woolly hair massed like an Astrakhan cap over a low, headstrong forehead, his bristling eyebrows with eyes like a wild cat's in ambush, gave the ferocious aspect of a Kalmuk, of a savage on the frontiers of civilization, who lived by war and marauding. Luckily the lower part of the face, the thick, double lips which parted readily in a fascinating, good-humored smile, tempered with a sort of Saint Vincent de Paul expression that uncouth ugliness, that original countenance, so original that it forgot to be commonplace. But his inferior extraction betrayed itself in another