He dismissed them with a majestic manner in singular contrast with the vulgar attire.
“Come, come,” he said to himself, when the door was shut. “I believe the young blade has comprehended me, and that in a week or so we shall have Master Gamain coming to aid me, with his ’prentice.”
CHAPTER XXIV.
HAPPY FAMILY.
ON the evening of this same day, about five, a scene passed in the third and top flat of a dirty old tumbledown house in Juiverie Street which we would like our readers to behold.
The interior of the sitting-room denoted poverty, and it was inhabited by three persons, a man, a woman, and a boy.
The man looked to be over fifty; he was wearing an old uniform of a French Guards sergeant, a habit venerated since these troops sided with the people in the riots and exchanged shots with the German dragoons.
He was dealing out playing cards and trying to find an infallible means of winning; a card by his side, pricked full of pinholes, showed that he was keeping tally of the runs.
The woman was four-and-thirty and appeared forty; she wore an old silk dress; her poverty was the more dreadful as she exhibited tokens of splendor; her hair was built up in a knot over a brass comb once gilded: and her hands were scrupulously cared for with the nails properly trimmed in an aristocratic style. The slippers on her feet, over openwork stockings, had been worked with gold and silver.
Her face might pass in candlelight for about thirty; but, without paint and powder it looked five years older than reality.
Its resemblance to Queen Marie Antoinette’s was still so marked that one tried to recall it in the dusty clouds thrown up by royal horses around the window of a royal coach.