 cannot affirm that I had ever witnessed the smile of
pleasure, or content, or kindness round M. Paul's lips, or in his eyes before.
The ironic, the sarcastic, the disdainful, the passionately exultant, I had
hundreds of times seen him express by what he called a smile, but any
illuminated sign of milder or warmer feeling struck me as wholly new in his
visage. It changed it as from a mask to a face: the deep lines left his
features; the very complexion seemed clearer and fresher; that swart, sallow,
southern darkness which spoke his Spanish blood, became displaced by a lighter
hue. I know not that I have ever seen in any other human face an equal
metamorphosis from a similar cause. He now took me to the carriage; at the same
moment M. de Bassompierre came out with his niece.
    In a pretty humour was Mistress Fanshawe; she had found the evening a grand
failure: completely upset as to temper, she gave way to the most uncontrolled
moroseness as soon as we were seated, and the carriage-door closed. Her
invectives against Dr. Bretton had something venomous in them. Having found
herself impotent either to charm or sting him, hatred was her only resource; and
this hatred she expressed in terms so unmeasured and proportion so monstrous,
that, after listening for a while with assumed stoicism, my outraged sense of
justice at last and suddenly caught fire. An explosion ensued: for I could be
passionate, too; especially with my present fair but faulty associate, who never
failed to stir the worst dregs of me. It was well that the carriage-wheels made
a tremendous rattle over the flinty Choseville pavement, for I can assure the
reader there was neither dead silence nor calm discussion within the vehicle.
Half in earnest, half in seeming, I made it my business to storm down Ginevra.
She had set out rampant from the Rue Crécy; it was necessary to tame her before
we reached the Rue Fossette: to this end it was indispensable to show up her
sterling value and high deserts; and this must be done in language of which the
fidelity and homeliness might challenge comparison with the compliments of a
John Knox to a Mary Stuart. This was the right discipline for Ginevra; it suited
her. I am quite sure she went to bed that night all the better and more settled
in mind and mood, and slept all the more sweetly for having undergone a sound
moral drubbing.
 

                                 Chapter XXVIII

                                 The Watchguard

M. Paul Emanuel owned an acute sensitiveness to the annoyance of interruption,
from whatsoever cause, occurring
