The boy, without turning to her, or moving, sent his blue glance gravely about the circle.  “Does she want me to?” he asked, in a tone of evident apprehension; and on his mother’s answering:  “Of course, you silly!” he added earnestly:  “How many more do you think there’ll be?”

Undine blushed to the ripples of her brilliant hair.  “I never knew such a child!  They’ve turned him into a perfect little savage!”

Raymond de Chelles advanced from behind his mother’s chair.

“He won’t be a savage long with me,” he said, stooping down so that his fatigued finely-drawn face was close to Paul’s.  Their eyes met and the boy smiled.  “Come along, old chap,” Chelles continued in English, drawing the little boy after him.

“Il est bien beau,” the Marquise de Chelles observed, her eyes turning from Paul’s grave face to her daughter-in-law’s vivid countenance.

“Do be nice, darling!  Say, ‘bonjour, Madame,’” Undine urged.

An odd mingling of emotions stirred in her while she stood watching Paul make the round of the family group under her husband’s guidance.  It was “lovely” to have the child back, and to find him, after their three years’ separation, grown into so endearing a figure:  her first glimpse of him when, in Mrs. Heeny’s arms, he had emerged that morning from the steamer train, had shown what an acquisition he would be.  If she had had any lingering doubts on the point, the impression produced on her husband would have dispelled them.  Chelles had been instantly charmed, and Paul, in a shy confused way, was already responding to his advances.  The Count and Countess Raymond had returned but a few weeks before from their protracted wedding journey, and were staying—­as they were apparently to do whenever they came to Paris—­with the old Marquis, Raymond’s father, who had amicably proposed that little Paul Marvell should also share the hospitality of the Hotel de Chelles.  Undine, at first, was somewhat dismayed to find that she was expected to fit the boy and his nurse into a corner of her contracted entresol.  But the possibility of a mother’s not finding room for her son, however cramped her own quarters, seemed not to have occurred to her new relations, and the preparing of her dressing-room and boudoir for Paul’s occupancy was carried on by the household with a zeal which obliged her to dissemble her lukewarmness.

Undine had supposed that on her marriage one of the great suites of the Hotel de Chelles would be emptied of its tenants and put at her husband’s disposal; but she had since learned that, even had such a plan occurred to her parents-in-law, considerations of economy would have hindered it.  The old Marquis and his wife, who were content, when they came up from Burgundy in the spring, with a modest set of rooms looking out on the court of their ancestral residence, expected their son and his wife to fit themselves into the still smaller apartment which had served as Raymond’s