and superior.  He saw her daughter, Lady Margaret Graham, a pale and pretty girl with an elfish face and copper-coloured hair.  He saw the Duchess of Mont St. Michel, black-eyed and opulent, and with her her two daughters, black-eyed and opulent also.  He saw Dr. Simon, a typical French scientist, with glasses, a pointed brown beard, and a forehead barred with those parallel wrinkles which are the penalty of superciliousness, since they come through constantly elevating the eyebrows.  He saw Father Brown, of Cobhole, in Essex, whom he had recently met in England.  He saw—­perhaps with more interest than any of these—­a tall man in uniform, who had bowed to the Galloways without receiving any very hearty acknowledgment, and who now advanced alone to pay his respects to his host.  This was Commandant O’Brien, of the French Foreign Legion.  He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy.  He was by birth an Irish gentleman, and in boyhood had known the Galloways—­especially Margaret Graham.  He had left his country after some crash of debts, and now expressed his complete freedom from British etiquette by swinging about in uniform, sabre and spurs.  When he bowed to the Ambassador’s family, Lord and Lady Galloway bent stiffly, and Lady Margaret looked away.

But for whatever old causes such people might be interested in each other, their distinguished host was not specially interested in them.  No one of them at least was in his eyes the guest of the evening.  Valentin was expecting, for special reasons, a man of world-wide fame, whose friendship he had secured during some of his great detective tours and triumphs in the United States.  He was expecting Julius K. Brayne, that multi-millionaire whose colossal and even crushing endowments of small religions have occasioned so much easy sport and easier solemnity for the American and English papers.  Nobody could quite make out whether Mr. Brayne was an atheist or a Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel.  One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare—­a hobby more patient than angling.  He admired Walt Whitman, but thought that Luke P. Tanner, of Paris, Pa., was more “progressive” than Whitman any day.  He liked anything that he thought “progressive.”  He thought Valentin “progressive,” thereby doing him a grave injustice.