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EVIL DAYS.
237

These thoughts would scarcely leave him when he was alone.


Trent served Sir James, well earning his pay for six months, and then returned to Paris, where he went to work again with a better heart. His powers had returned to him, and he began to live more happily than he had expected among a tribe of strangely assorted friends, French, English, and American, artists, poets, journalists, policemen, hotel-keepers, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and others. His old faculty of sympathetic interest in his fellows won for him, just as in his student days, privileges seldom extended to the Briton. He enjoyed again the rare experience of being taken into the bosom of a Frenchman's family. He was admitted to the momentous confidence of les jeunes, and found them as sure that they had surprised the secrets of art and life as the departed jeunes of ten years before had been.

The bosom of the Frenchman's family was the same as those he had known in the past, even to the patterns of the wallpaper and movables. But the jeunes, he perceived with regret, were totally different from their forerunners. They