man who is driving a pair of horses down the Champs Elysees cannot give
much thought to his little dog that runs behind. And it is in the
Bonaparte blood to drive, not only a pair, but a four-in-hand in the
thickest traffic of the world. The Abbe Susini tells me that when the
emperor's hand was firm, Corsica was almost orderly, justice was almost
administered, banditism was for the moment made to feel the hand of the
law, and the authorities could count the number of outlaws evading their
grip in the mountains. But since the emperor's illness has taken a
dangerous turn things have gone back again. Corsica is, it seems, a
weather-glass by which one may tell the state of the political weather in
France; and now it is disturbed, mademoiselle."

He had become graver as he spoke, and now found himself addressing Denise
almost as if she were a man. There is as much difference in listeners as
there is in talkers. And Lory de Vasselot, who belonged to the new school
of Frenchmen--the open-air, the vigorous, the sportsmanlike--found his
interlocutor listening with clear eyes fixed frankly on his face.
Intelligence betrays itself in listening more than in talking, and de
Vasselot, with characteristic and an eminently national intuition,
perceived that this girl from a covent school in the Rue du Cherche-Midi
was not a person to whom to address drawing-room generalities, and those
insults to the feminine comprehension which a bygone generation called
compliments.

"But a woman need surely have nothing to fear," said Denise, who had the
habit of carrying her head rather high, and now spoke as if this implied
more than a mere trick of deportment.

"A woman! You are not going to Corsica, mademoiselle?"