Aurora's affectionate look was just tinged with regret. She had suffered a disappointment in connection with Manlio. An obstinate and uncompromising woman beyond the ocean, when invited to join in a harmless conspiracy, had preferred to do actually, to the tune of eight thousand dollars, what the grasping creature should have been satisfied with merely appearing to do. The happiness that pierced through Manlio's calm, like a strong light through pale marble, came to him from the bride elect's aunt, and Aurora felt robbed. But Mrs. Foss's hand found hers under the table and gave it a warm squeeze, whereupon Aurora's heart swelled in a way it had of doing. When such a dilation took place, something simultaneously happened to her eyes: the surrounding world was revealed to them as "too lovely for anything." Dimples declared her joy. "Won't somebody have something more?" she asked, with the spoon in her hand poised over a bowl still half full of chicken mayonnaise. But every one was done with eating; all were in haste to go down on to the floor and find amusement, perhaps adventure, amid the fluctuating, fascinating crowd. The box was fairly deserted when the door opened again, and the eyes of those left in it, turning to see who entered, were met by two unknown maskers. One wore the costume of a _bravo_ of old times, picturesque, disreputable, an operatic _Sparafucile_ in tattered mantle and ragged plume. The other was in a black satin domino, and had the face of a crow, a great black beak projecting from a black mask. They stood a little way inside of the door as if waiting to be addressed. There was silence for a moment, while the others waited likewise. Within the eye-holes of their masks the eyes of the intruders glittered in the glassy, baffling way of eyes behind masks. Aurora, unused to the mode of procedure at a _veglione_, asked helplessly in a whisper of Landini: "What shall I say to them?" He spoke for her then, in Italian, because he thought it probable that these were Florentines who had come into a strange box for a lark. "Good evening," he said. "Will you speak, or sing, and let us know what we can do for your service?" The bravo, lifting two long hands in loose and torn black gloves, rapidly made signs, like the deaf and dumb. "You speak too loud," said Gerald. "We are deafened. Let the lady speak." The black domino, with a shrug of the shoulders and a gesture of black-gloved hands excusing the limitations of a bird, answered by a simple caw. Aurora now found her tongue and her cue: "And is it yourselves?" she burst in rollickingly. "Proud to meet you! Will you partake?" With a hospitable sweep of the arm, intelligible to speakers of any language, she made them free of her supper-table, where the candles still twinkled over an appetizing abundance. Gerald watched sharply, saying to himself: "If they accept, we shall at least see their chins."