black velvet--only for the form. Her bare shoulders and arms, of an
insolent beauty, forbade any mistake as to her identity. Gerald knew,
like the rest, that it was Castagnola's model.

Charlie passed him, at a little distance, with a laughing lady hitched
to his elbow. Her mask swung from her hand--the ball was wearing to its
end, and masks are hot. The hood of her rose-colored domino had been
pushed back from a mass of ruffled black hair; her eyes and teeth
gleamed with equal brightness and directness of purpose. It was
suggested to Gerald by her air and manner that she had forgotten the
spectators. Her freedom from constraint was shared by Charlie. Seeing
them together reminded Gerald that Charlie was after all Italian,--one
forgot it sometimes. He tried to remember which of the bits of scandal
tossed on to the dust-heap at the back of his memory was the one fitting
this Signora Sartorio.

They passed out of sight, and he forgot them in the interest of the next
thing.

Carlo Guerra, like him alone, stopped to chat with him. Guerra, a
pleasant figure in Anglo-American as well as Florentine circles, with
his fine head of a monk whom circumstances have rendered worldly, had,
before inheriting his comfortable income, been a journalist. He still
enjoyed above all things the exercise of the critical faculty, and had
much to say this evening about a recent exhibition of paintings.

Gerald was hearing it with proper interest when some part of his
attention was drawn away by a sound across the house. It was, softened
by distance, that species of lion's roar, incredibly large as issuing
from a human throat, and comical from such a disproportion, which had
startled the audience several times already that evening. Gerald turned,
without much thinking, to look off in the direction whence it came and
single out the figure with which it was associated, when he was
surprised to find the figure he sought almost under his nose. Not more
than six feet from him were to be seen the tattered mantle and ragged
plume of _Sparafucile_; likewise the thick crow's-beak of the black
domino.

The two were looking at him and, his impression was, laughing. He
fancied they were on the point of speaking to him,--he had thought
earlier in the evening when they came into the box that they might be
acquaintances,--but the crow suddenly pressed tittering against the
bandit, pushing and pulling him away. In a moment they were lost among
the crowd.