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Each of them was pleased with what he got, particularly Mellin. “The left is nearer the heart,” he thought.

She led them through the curtains, not withdrawing her hands until they entered the salon. She might have led them out of her fifth-story window in that fashion, had she chosen.

“My two wicked boys!” she laughed tenderly. This also pleased both of them, though each would have preferred to be her only wicked boy–a preference which, perhaps, had something to do with the later events of the evening.

“Aha! I know you both; before twenty minute’ you will be makin’ love to Lady Mount-Rhyswicke. Behol’ those two already! An’ they are only ole frien’s.”

She pointed to Pedlow and Sneyd. The fat man was shouting at a woman in pink satin, who lounged, half-reclining, among a pile of cushions upon a divan near the fire; Sneyd gallantly bending over her to kiss her hand.

“It is a very little dinner, you see,” continued the hostess, “only seven, but we shall be seven time’ happier.”

The seventh person proved to be the Italian, Corni, who had surrendered his seat in Madame de Vaurigard’s victoria to Mellin on the Pincio. He presently made his appearance followed by a waiter bearing a tray of glasses filled with a pink liquid, while the Countess led her two wicked boys across the room to present them to Lady Mount-Rhyswicke. Already Mellin was forming sentences for his next letter to the Cranston Telegraph: “Lady Mount-Rhyswicke said to me the other evening, while discussing the foreign policy of Great Britain, in Comtesse de Vaurigard’s salon…” “An English peeress of pronounced literary acumen has been giving me rather confidentially her opinion of our American poets…”

The inspiration of these promising fragments was a large, weary-looking person, with no lack of powdered shoulder above her pink bodice and a profusion of “undulated” hair of so decided a blond that it might have been suspected that the decision had lain with the lady herself.

“Howjdo,” she said languidly, when Mellin’s name was pronounced to her. “There’s a man behind you tryin’ to give you something to drink.”

“Who was it said these were Martinis?” snorted Pedlow. “They’ve got perfumery in ’em.”

“Ah, what a bad lion it is!” Madame de Vaurigard lifted both hands in mock horror. “Roar, lion, roar!” she cried. “An’ think of the emotion of our good Cavaliere Corni, who have come an hour early jus’ to make them for us! I ask Monsieur Mellin if it is not good.”

“And I’ll leave it to Cooley,” said Pedlow. “If he can drink all of his I’ll eat crow!”

Thus challenged, the two young men smilingly accepted glasses from the waiter, and lifted them on high.

“Same toast,” said Cooley. “Queen!”

“A la belle Marquise!”

Gallantly they drained the glasses at a gulp, and Madame de Vaurigard clapped her hands.

“Bravo!” she cried. “You see? Corni and I, we win.”

“Look at their faces!” said Mr. Pedlow, tactlessly drawing attention to what was, for the moment, an undeniably painful sight. “Don’t tell me an Italian knows how to make a good Martini!”

Mellin profoundly agreed, but, as he joined the small procession to the Countess’ dinner-table, he was certain that an Italian at least knew how to make a strong one.

The light in the dining-room was provided by six heavily-shaded candles on the table; the latter decorated with delicate lines of orchids. The chairs were large and comfortable, covered with tapestry; the glass was old Venetian, and the servants, moving like useful ghosts in the shadow outside the circle of mellow light, were particularly efficient in the matter of keeping the wine-glasses full. Madame de Vaurigard had put Pedlow on her right, Cooley on her left, with Mellin directly opposite her, next to Lady Mount-Rhyswicke. Mellin was pleased, because he thought he would have the Countess’s face toward him. Anything would have pleased him just then.

“This is the kind of table everybody ought to have,” he observed to the party in general, as he finished his first glass of champagne. “I’m going to have it like this at my place in the States–if I ever decide to go back. I’ll have six separate candlesticks like this, not a candelabrum, and that will be the only light in the room. And I’ll never have anything but orchids on my table–“