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 , Marquis de Saint-Hubertin, had the peculiar trick of spreading a sort of hush about him wherever he went; not a hush of dread, but rather one of uneasy expectancy as if he were waiting for the answer to a silent question— though at times he put it into thin, trembling words which nobody understood except Father Gustave, the old priest who officiated at the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-Grace.

The marquis seemed to look for the answer to his question in the face of every man whom he encountered in his daily wanderings through the narrow, packed streets which converge on the Place de Thionville.

There, in the busiest section of Paris, he had lived for many years, ever since his return from Corsica, in one of those huge apartment barracks of red brick and white stucco, the front pierced with countless and unevenly spaced windows enlivened by bird-