I, Adrian Trent, now known as Lord Trent, and a captain of _Les Mousquetaires Gris_, sat in my little salon in the Lion d'Or, in the Rue Louis le Grand in Paris, on Midsummer Day, in the year of our Lord 1726. And in my hand I held a little perfumed billet, which I had turned over in my fingers a dozen times, and had, perhaps, read twice as often. For it recalled to me a strange meeting, and some strange scenes in which I had been concerned when I was but a _porte-drapeau_. Also it recalled to me some other things far sweeter, which, to a young man, must needs be pleasant recollections--to wit, things such as a lovely face flushed now and again with the colour that adorns the blushing rose of Provence; dark eyes, sometimes as soft as velvet, and sometimes sparkling like ice beneath the winter sun; black hair that once--in an awful moment of fear and extremity--I had seen adown the owner's back, almost to her feet; a supple girlish form, and other charms. A girl whom, although I had not seen her for five years, I had never forgotten, but whom I always strove to forget, because she was wealthy and I was poor; because, although I was a man of good rank in my own country, she was almost of the very highest in hers; because she was, in truth, as far above me as the sun is above the earth. Yet once, for a little while, that girl and I had been the best of friends; once, too, it seemed as if that friendship had been very near to a softer and more tender emotion, and as if Adrian Trent and Ana, Princesa de Carbajal, were falling in love with each other--if they had not already done so.
Whereupon, thinking over all these things, I again turned the letter in my hands, and again I read it.
"So you are back in Paris, I hear," it ran; "and would you not like to see a girl called Damaris whom once you knew? I think you would--perhaps in memory of having saved that girl's life on one occasion;[1] of also having once called her by the prettiest epithet a man can bestow on any woman, and of having been much teased and pestered by that girl. If so, then come to the Marais, to the Rue des Vraies Femmes, and to the house which bears the name of my family, and if you come at the proper time I will give you some chocolate and a bonbon. I wonder if you are much changed, and if you will find me so!