ice.  In an instant Calvert had reached him.  Monsieur de St. Aulaire was lying quite still and unconscious, with a thin stream of blood trickling from a scalp wound on the temple, which had struck a splinter of ice.  In a few minutes, after much chafing of his hands and head, he opened his eyes, and Calvert and the crowd who had quickly surrounded the two were relieved to see that the injury had not been serious.  A dozen fine handkerchiefs were torn up, and Calvert bound the wounded temple and helped him, still half-stunned, to rise.  The fresh air revived him somewhat, and, Madame de Segur’s coachman running up at this moment to tell him that his mistress’s carriage was at his disposal, he was helped to it, and, amid the sympathetic murmurs of the crowd, was sent off to his apartments in the Palais Royal.

“A thousand pardons for causing you so much trouble, Monsieur,” he said, turning to Calvert, with one foot on the step of the carriage.  “I shall not forget this afternoon,” and he bowed with his accustomed grace, looking incomparably handsome in spite of his pallor and weakness and the bandage about his forehead, and Calvert could not help but admire the courtly ease of his manner, though he saw, too, the evil smile on his lips and the ugly look in his eye.  As he turned away he caught sight of Madame de St. Andre, who stood looking after the carriage with an expression of anxiety on her face, which Calvert noticed had lost its rosy color and was now quite pale.  He would have gone to her to reassure her concerning Monsieur de St. Aulaire’s safety, but when he went toward her she pretended not to see him, and quickly joined Madame d’Azay and the Marechal de Segur.

The company broke up soon after the accident to Monsieur de St. Aulaire, and in a few minutes Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Morris, and Calvert were in their carriage on the way to the Legation, where Mr. Morris was engaged to dine that evening.

“I thought you had told me that Mr. Calvert was quite indifferent to the fair sex,” says Mr. Morris, laughing, and speaking to Mr. Jefferson, but with a side glance at the young man.  “If so, he takes a strange way of proving it.  He will be the most-talked-of, and therefore the most envied, man in Paris to-morrow,” and he began to laugh again.

“Was jumping in the curriculum at the College of Princeton?” asks Mr. Jefferson, laughing, too.

“But beware of St. Aulaire,” said Mr. Morris, suddenly becoming grave and laying a kindly hand on Calvert’s shoulder.  “I misjudge him if he will take even a fair defeat at sport in the right spirit.  Look out for him, Ned—­he will not play fair and he will not forget a grudge, or I am greatly deceived in him.”

But it was not of Monsieur le Baron’s possible revenge or even of his cracked head that Mr. Calvert thought, but of his unrivalled gallantry of bearing and his splendid appearance.  And that night when he retired to his own room he practised St. Aulaire’s graceful bow before the long cheval glass, though with most indifferent success, it must be confessed.