D’Artagnan, who, as we have said, was exceedingly prudent for a young man of twenty, then remembered his suspicions regarding Milady.  He launched into a eulogy of his Eminence, and said that he should not have failed to enter into the Guards of the cardinal instead of the king’s Guards if he had happened to know M. de Cavois instead of M. de Treville.

Milady changed the conversation without any appearance of affectation, and asked d’Artagnan in the most careless manner possible if he had ever been in England.

D’Artagnan replied that he had been sent thither by M. de Treville to treat for a supply of horses, and that he had brought back four as specimens.

Milady in the course of the conversation twice or thrice bit her lips; she had to deal with a Gascon who played close.

At the same hour as on the preceding evening, d’Artagnan retired.  In the corridor he again met the pretty Kitty; that was the name of the soubrette.  She looked at him with an expression of kindness which it was impossible to mistake; but d’Artagnan was so preoccupied by the mistress that he noticed absolutely nothing but her.

D’Artagnan came again on the morrow and the day after that, and each day Milady gave him a more gracious reception.

Every evening, either in the antechamber, the corridor, or on the stairs, he met the pretty soubrette.  But, as we have said, d’Artagnan paid no attention to this persistence of poor Kitty.

32 A procurator’s dinner

However brilliant had been the part played by Porthos in the duel, it had not made him forget the dinner of the procurator’s wife.

On the morrow he received the last touches of Mousqueton’s brush for an hour, and took his way toward the Rue aux Ours with the steps of a man who was doubly in favor with fortune.

His heart beat, but not like d’Artagnan’s with a young and impatient love.  No; a more material interest stirred his blood.  He was about at last to pass that mysterious threshold, to climb those unknown stairs by which, one by one, the old crowns of M. Coquenard had ascended.  He was about to see in reality a certain coffer of which he had twenty times beheld the image in his dreams—­a coffer long and deep, locked, bolted, fastened in the wall; a coffer of which he had so often heard, and which the hands—­a little wrinkled, it is true, but still not without elegance—­of the procurator’s wife were about to open to his admiring looks.

And then he—­a wanderer on the earth, a man without fortune, a man without family, a soldier accustomed to inns, cabarets, taverns, and restaurants, a lover of wine forced to depend upon chance treats—­was about to partake of family meals, to enjoy the pleasures of a comfortable establishment, and to give himself up to those little attentions which “the harder one is, the more they please,” as old soldiers say.

To come in the capacity of a cousin, and seat himself every day at a good table; to smooth the yellow, wrinkled brow of the old procurator; to pluck the clerks a little by teaching them Bassette, passe-DIX, and lansquenet, in their utmost nicety, and winning from them, by way of fee for the lesson he would give them in an hour, their savings of a month—­all this was enormously delightful to Porthos.