"Ah, I have heard of that." Lebeau turned his green spectacles full on Graham's face as he said slowly, "And what do you think of it?" Graham prudently checked the disparaging reply that first occurred to him, and said, "I know so little about it that I would rather ask you." "I think it might become formidable if it found able leaders who knew how to use it. Pardon me, how came you to know of this cafe? Were you recommended to it?" "No; I happened to be in this neighbourhood on business, and walked in, as I might into any other cafe." "You don't interest yourself in the great social questions which are agitated below the surface of this best of all possible worlds?" "I can't say that I trouble my head much about them." "A game at dominos before M. Georges arrives?" "Willingly. Is M. Georges one of those agitators below the surface?" "No, indeed. It is for you to play." Here M. Georges arrived, and no further conversation on political or social questions ensued. Graham had already called more than once at M. Lebeau's office, and asked him to put into good French various letters on matters of business, the subjects of which had been furnished by M. Renard. The office was rather imposing and stately, considering the modest nature of M. Lebeau's ostensible profession. It occupied the entire ground-floor of a corner house, with a front-door at one angle and a back-door at the other. The anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to wait some minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled, and not only by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance, might be fairly supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid as polite letter- writers,--not only by servant-maids and grisettes, by sailors, zouaves, and journeymen workmen,--but not unfrequently by clients evidently belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class of society,--men with clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again, who, less fashionably attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers of well-to-do families,--the first generally young, the last generally middle-aged. All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by a saturnine clerk into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in precedence of the _ouvriers_ and _grisettes_. "What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this humble business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy concealed,--the International Association?" And so pondering, the clerk one day singled him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau's cabinet. Graham thought the time had now arrived when he might safely approach the subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.