Charlie, receiving the invitation, pondered a while before accepting. He considered himself to have been insulted, rather, by Mrs. Hawthorne. Still, he could not be absolutely sure. If, anyhow, she did not know that he knew the black crow to have been none other than herself there would be nothing in his going to her dinner-party which laid him open to scorn. And he felt more disposed to go than not. The dinner would be festive, costly, succulent. Then he desired before breaking with her--if breach there must be, which would depend upon the subtlest circumstances--to persuade her that two enormous porcelain jars owned by a dealer of his acquaintance were the very thing needed in that bare-looking ball-room of hers. There was a third reason. A lady whose friendship had latterly--since the night of the _veglione_, in fact--taken on the glow of roses and the warmth of wine, had taken it into her charming head to be jealous, fantastically, of Mrs. Hawthorne. Charlie, whose manly vanity his good fortune had, not unnaturally, reinforced; Charlie, who if he were loved much must always love less than the other, felt a certain stimulation in exhibitions of jealousy with regard to himself. He thought well of the results of saying, "I cannot come this evening, _cara_, I am dining at the Hawthorne's." So he accepted Aurora's invitation. The dinner was superlative, but it was written he should leave the house finally in a bad humor. The feasted guest was a big Western American, of the immensely rich and not very interesting type, whom he had seen once or twice at the bank. Aurora's fond esteem for this man was open and shameless. Whether he were a "has been," an "is," or a "to be," Charlie could not determine, but only in the character of suitor could he see him in the picture. The dark face of Landini, his Chief, across the dinner table, when his eyes sought it was indecipherable to him; but, shut as it was, he was reminded by it, not to the improvement of his spirits, of a little personal hope, a just and rational hope, which might have to be relinquished. After dinner he got his hostess into a quiet corner for a chat. "Where's Gerald?" pure curiosity made him ask, with that impertinence which his friends were accustomed to and took lightly, because curiosity and impertinence were part and parcel of Charlie, and if you cared sufficiently for his attractive smoothness and flashing smile to wish them near you, you must put up with the bad breeding underlying his good manners. "Where's Gerald?" he asked familiarly. "Gerald isn't well enough yet to be out," Aurora answered him, with imperfect candor. "You didn't know he'd been ill? Why, how funny! He's been having what you call here a 'fluxion of the chest.'" This ignorance of Charlie's comforted her by proving that the news of her nursing Gerald had not spread over the town like wildfire, as she had been warned it would. Florence was not so bad or nimble a gossip as she had feared.