For a few moments Henry was alone and uncared for, and he examined his surroundings. His first conclusion was that there was not a pretty woman in the room, and his second, that this fact had not escaped the notice of several other men who were hanging about in corners. Then Mrs. Ashton Portway, having accomplished the task of receiving, beckoned him, and intimated to him that, being a lion and the king of beasts, he must roar. 'I think everyone here has done something,' she said as she took him round and forced him to roar. His roaring was a miserable fiasco, but most people mistook it for the latest fashion in roaring, and were impressed. 'Now you must take someone down to get something to eat,' she apprised him, when he had growled out soft nothings to poetesses, paragraphists, publicists, positivists, penny-a-liners, and other pale persons. 'Whom shall it be?--Ashton! What have you done?' The phonograph had been advertised to give a reproduction of Ternina in the Liebestod from _Tristan und Isolde_, but instead it broke into the 'Washington Post,' and the room, braced to a great occasion, was horrified. Mrs. Portway, abandoning Henry, ran to silence the disastrous consequence of her husband's clumsiness. Henry, perhaps impelled by an instinctive longing, gazed absently through the open door into the passage, and there, with two other girls on a settee, he perceived Geraldine! She smiled, rose, and came towards him. She looked disconcertingly pretty; she was always at her best in the evening; and she had such eyes to gaze on him. 'You here!' she murmured. Ordinary words, but they were enveloped in layers of feeling, as a child's simple gift may be wrapped in lovely tinted tissue-papers! 'She's the finest woman in the place,' he thought decisively. And he said to her: 'Will you come down and have something to eat?' 'I can talk to _her_,' he reflected with satisfaction, as the faultless young man handed them desired sandwiches in the supper-room. What he meant was that she could talk to him; but men often make this mistake. Before he had eaten half a sandwich, the period of time between that night and the night at the Louvre had been absolutely blotted out. He did not know why. He could think of no explanation. It merely was so. She told him she had sold a sensational serial for a pound a thousand words. 'Not a bad price--for me,' she added. 'Not half enough!' he exclaimed ardently. Her eyes moistened. He thought what a shame it was that a creature like her should be compelled to earn even a portion of her livelihood by typewriting for Mark Snyder. The faultless young man unostentatiously poured more wine into their glasses. No other guests happened to be in the room.... 'Ah, you're here!' It was the hostess, sniggering. 'You told me to bring someone down,' said Henry, who had no intention of being outfaced now. 'We're just coming up,' Geraldine added.