the Bois de Boulogne, was not a source of unalloyed delight. Longmore
had dark blue eyes of admirable clarity, settled truth-telling eyes
which had in his childhood always made his harshest taskmasters smile at
his notion of a subterfuge. An observer watching the two men and knowing
something of their relations would certainly have said that what he had
at last both to recognise and to miss in those eyes must not a little
have puzzled and tormented M. de Mauves. They took possession of him,
they laid him out, they measured him in that state of flatness, they
triumphed over him, they treated him as no pair of eyes had perhaps ever
treated any member of his family before. The Count's scheme had been to
provide for a positive state of ease on the part of no one save himself,
but here was Longmore already, if appearances perhaps not appreciable to
the vulgar meant anything, primed as for some prospect of pleasure more
than Parisian. Was this candid young barbarian but a faux bonhomme after
all? He had never really quite satisfied his occasional host, but was he
now, for a climax, to leave him almost gaping?

M. de Mauves, as if hating to seem preoccupied, took up the evening
paper to help himself to seem indifferent. As he glanced over it he
threw off some perfunctory allusion to the crisis--the political--which
enabled Longmore to reply with perfect veracity that, with other things
to think about, he had had no attention to spare for it. And yet our
hero was in truth far from secure against rueful reflexion. The Count's
ruffled state was a comfort so far as it pointed to the possibility that
the lady in the coupe might be proving too many for him; but it
ministered to no vindictive sweetness for Longmore so far as it should
perhaps represent rising jealousy. It passed through his mind that
jealousy is a passion with a double face and that on one of its sides it
may sometimes almost look generous. It glimmered upon him odiously M. de
Mauves might grow ashamed of his political compact with his wife, and he