efore you?" pointing to an elaborate confection. "It bears
your initials, you see. It was conceived and executed since you
arrived--rather, I should say, since it was known that you would honor
us with your company. The greatest difficulty encountered was to find
out what your initials were."

"And I suppose," mischievously added the young girl to her
acknowledgments, "that the same fertile mind which conceived the design
eventually provided the initials?"

"That is our secret," responded Somers, with affected gravity.

The wines were of characteristic expensiveness, and provoked the same
general comment. Rushbrook seldom drank wine; Somers had selected
it. But the barbaric opulence of the entertainment culminated in the
Californian fruits, piled in pyramids on silver dishes, gorgeous and
unreal in their size and painted beauty, and the two Divas smiled over
a basket of grapes and peaches as outrageous in dimensions and glaring
color as any pasteboard banquet at which they had professionally
assisted. As the courses succeeded each other, under the exaltation of
wine, conversation became more general as regarded participation, but
more local and private as regarded the subject, until Miss Nevil could
no longer follow it. The interests of that one, the hopes of another,
the claims of a third, in affairs that were otherwise uninteresting,
were all discussed with singular youthfulness of trust that to her
alone seemed remarkable. Not that she lacked entertainment from the
conversation of her clever companion, whose confidences and criticisms
were very pleasant to her; but she had a gentlewoman's instinct that he
talked to her too much, and more than was consistent with his duties
as the general host. She looked around the table for her singular
acquaintance of an hour before, but she had not seen him since. She
would have spoken about him to Somers, but she had an instinctive
idea that the latter would be antipathetic, in spite of the stranger's
flattering commendation. So she found herself again following Somers's
cynical but good-humored description of the various guests, and, I
fear, seeing with his eyes, listening with his ears, and occasionally
participating in his superior attitude. The "fearful joy" she had found
in the novelty of the situation and the originality of the actors seemed
now quite right from this critical point of view. So she learned how the
guest with the long hair was an unknown painter, to whom Ru