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salute.
"But yes. Am I happy enough to be able to do anything for Monsieur?"
He spoke in a high, thin voice that was almost childlike, and a feeling
of misgiving ran through me that one so young and inexperienced as
Mademoiselle de Clericy should be abroad on such a day with no better
escort than this old man.
"Pardon my addressing you," I said, "but I hear that you are seeking a
secretary. I only ask permission to call at your hotel and apply for the

post."
"But, mon grand monsieur," he said with a delightful playfulness,
spreading out his hands in recognition of my height and east-country
bulk, "this is no time to talk of affairs. To-day we are at pleasure."
"Not all, Monsieur; some are busy enough," I replied, handing him my
card, which he held close to his eyes, after the manner of one who has
never possessed long or keen sight.
"What determination!" he exclaimed, with an old man's tolerance.
"Mon Dieu! these English allies of ours!"
"Well!" he said, after a pause, "if Monsieur honours me with such a
request, I shall be in and at your service from ten o'clock to-morrow
morning."
He felt in his pocket and handed me a card with courtesy. It was quite
refreshing to meet such a man in Paris in 1869--so naïve, so
unassuming, so free from that aggressive self-esteem which
characterized Frenchmen before the war. Since I had arrived in the
capital under the circumstances that amused John Turner so
consumedly, I had been tempted to raise my fist in the face of every
second flaneur I met on the boulevard.
Again I joined my English friend, who was standing where I had left
him, looking around him with a stout, good-natured tolerance.
"Well," he asked, "have you got the situation?"
"No; but I am going to call to-morrow morning at ten o'clock and
obtain it."
"Umph!" said John Turner; "I did not know you were such a
scoundrel."
Chapter II

Monsieur
"La destinée a deux manières de nous briser; en se refusant à nos désirs
et en les accomplissant."
To some the night brings wiser or at all events a second counsel. For
myself, however, it has never been so. In the prosecution of such small
enterprises as have marked a life no more eventful than those around it,
I have always awakened in the morning of the same mind as I was
when sleep laid its quiet hand upon me. It seems, moreover, that I have
made just as many as but no more mistakes than my neighbours.
Taking it likewise as a broad generality, the balance seems, in my
experience, to tell quite perceptibly in favour of those who make up
their minds and hold to that decision firmly, rather than towards such
men as seek counsel of the multitude and trim their sail to the tame
breeze of precedent.
"Always go straight for a jump," my father had shouted to me once,
years ago, while I sat up in a Norfolk ditch and watched my horse
disappear through a gap in the next hedge.
I awoke on the morning after the centenary fêtes without any doubt in
my mind--being still determined to seek a situation for which I was
unfitted.
Having quarrelled with my father, who obstinately refused to pay a few
debts such as no young man living in London could, with self-respect,
avoid, I was still in the enjoyment of a small annual income left to me
by a mother whom I had never seen--upon whose grave in the old,
disused churchyard at Hopton I had indeed been taught to lay a few
flowers before I fully realised the meaning of such tribute. That my
irate old sire had threatened to cut me off with as near an approach to
one shilling as an entail would allow had not given me much anxiety.
The dear old gentleman had done so a hundred times before--as early,
indeed, as my second term at Cambridge, where he had considerably
surprised the waiter at the Bull by a display of honest British wrath.
It was, in all truth, necessary that I should do something--should find

one of those occupations (heavily salaried) for which, I make no doubt,
as many incompetent youths seek to-day as twenty-five years ago.
"What you want," John Turner had said, when I explained my position
to him, "is no doubt something that will enable a gentleman to live like
a lord."
Now, Monsieur de Clericy was probably prepared to give two hundred
pounds a year to his secretary. But it was with Mademoiselle--and I did
not even know her Christian name--that I was anxious to treat. What
would she give?
It was, I remember, a lovely morning. What weather these Napoleons
had, from