Countess and Cabinet Noir Join Forces

In Paris the Duke Louis Delgado was nursing, with lukewarm indignation,
wrath against his royal uncle of Galavia who had fixed upon him a sort
of modified exile.

Louis had only a languid interest in the feud between his arm of the
family and the reigning branch. He would willingly enough have taken a
scepter from the hand of any King-maker who proffered it, but he would
certainly never, of his own incentive, have struck a blow for a throne.

Sometimes, indeed, as he sat at a café table on the Champs Elysées
when awakening dreams of Spring were in the air and a military band was
playing in the distance, dormant ambitions awoke. Sometimes when he
watched the opalescent gleam in his glass as the garçon carefully
dripped water over absinthe, he would picture himself wresting from the
incumbent, the Crown of Galavia, and would hear throngs shouting "Long
live King Louis!" At such moments his stimulated spirit would indulge in
large visions, and his half-degenerate face would smile through its
gentle but dissipated languor.

Louis Delgado was a man of inaction. He had that quality of personal
daring which is not akin to moral resoluteness. He was ready enough at a
fancied insult to exchange cards and meet his adversary on the field,
but a throne against which he plotted was as safe, unless threatened by
outside influences, as a throne may ever be.

When Louis presented Jusseret to the Countess Astaride there flashed
between the woman of audacious imagination and the master of intrigue a
message of kinship. The Frenchman bent low over her hand.