in one by one, and exchanged the
customary salutations. Time was when they had been immensely interesting
as types of mankind more or less rural or townish, but to-night he was
weary of them, and would very willingly have been alone. The half-seen
vision of two hours ago had passed completely from his mind, and the
broad-beamed, apple-cheeked Evariste had already served the soup when
Madame la Baronne de Wyeth rustled into the room with an aspect so
commanding and stately that all the Belgian gentlemen rose to their feet
and bowed as she took her seat at table. Paul rose and bowed with the
rest, and the lady, with an easy and graceful inclination from left
to right, offered to him a kind of specialized salute as she sat down
immediately opposite to him. She was full between the glow of the two
extra lamps, and at a first glance, by dint of bright eyes, sparkling
teeth, a high complexion, and a Parisian half-toilet, she looked as if
she might have been a beauty. She was barely that, as a second glance
discovered, but she had an undoubted charm of grace and manner, and
Paul, whose native origin and customs of life had led him far from the
scene of fine ladyhood, was greatly impressed by her. So were the rest
of the diners for that matter, and the customary rough banter of the
table was hushed in the presence of this new arrival. The men conversed
in whispers when they spoke at all, and in the intervals between the
courses they crumbled their bread upon the tablecloth in a manifest
embarrassment. Not a word was exchanged between Paul and his vis-a-vis
until, towards the close of the meal, the lady's attendant brought to
her a small tray of silver with a fine little flacon of transparent
Venetian ware, and a liqueur-glass upon it She had drunk nothing but
water throughout the repast, but she now poured out a spoonful of some
amber-coloured and highly aromatic liqueur, and, leaning slightly across
the table, said, with a marked American-English accent:

'May I trouble you for a single small lump of sugar, Mr. Armstrong?'

She held out the liqueur-glass towards him, and Paul, in answer to an
imperious little nod of the head, which seemed to indicate that he was
obeying orders correctly, dropped a square nodule of sugar into it, and
looked up with a questioning aspect.

'My name appears to be known to you, madam?' he said.

'My dear sir,'she purred back again in what he learned to recognise
later on as the true Bostonian t