If the vacillation of Louis Delgado could be complemented by the strong ambition of a woman, perhaps he might be almost as serviceable as though the strength were inherent. And Paris knew that Louis worshiped at the shrine of the Countess Astaride. The Countess was therefore worth inspecting.
The presentation occurred in Paris, when the Duke took his acquaintance to the charming apartments overlooking the Arc de Triomphe, where the lady poured tea for a small _salon_ enlisted from that colony of ambitious and broken-hearted men and women who hold fanatically to the faith that some throne, occupied by another, should be their own. Here with ceremony and stately etiquette foregathered Carlists and Bonapartists and exiled Dictators from South America. Here one heard the gossip of large conspiracies that come to nothing; of revolutions that go no farther than talk.
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.