Soon after Mrs. Frost had left the breakfast-room and Tom had started
forth with horse and sleigh, Dan returned. The Marquis promptly reminded
him of the suggestion that he should be taken over the Inn. It seemed to
Dan an uninteresting way to entertain his guest and the morning was a
busy one. However, he promised to be ready at eleven o'clock to show the
Marquis all there was in the old house.

As Dan went about the offices and stables, performing himself much of the
work that in prosperous times fell to grooms and hostlers, he found
himself thinking about his new guest. Dan knew enough of French history
to be aware there were frequent occasions in France when partisans of the
various factions, royalist, imperialist, or republican, found it best to
expatriate themselves. He knew that in times past many of the most
distinguished exiles had found asylum in America. But at the present, he
understood, King Louis Philippe, was reigning quietly at the Tuileries
and, moreover, the Marquis de Boisdhyver, mysterious as he was, did not
suggest the political adventurer of whom Dan as a boy had heard his
parents tell such extraordinary tales. In the few years immediately after
the final fall of the great Bonaparte there had been an influx of
imperialistic supporters in America, some of whom had even found their
way to Monday Port and Deal. One of these, Dan remembered, had stayed
for some months in '14 or '15 at the Inn at the Red Oak, and it was he
whom Tom had recalled the night before as having told them stories of his
adventurous exploits in the wars of the Little Corporal. But it was too
long after Napoleon's fall to connect his present guest with the imperial
exiles. He could imagine no ulterior reason for the Marquis's coming and
was inclined to put it down as the caprice of an old restless gentleman
who had a genuine mania for solitude. Of solitude, certainly, he was apt
to get his fill at the Inn at the Red Oak.