The dinner had been interesting,--he had not been much affected, he was glad to find, by the presence of the De Brézés,--but he had risen from it haunted by the conviction that the Fosses were not happy. Nobody, if one examined into it, was happy; all this pretense was pathetic to the point of dreariness. Gerald knew everybody's affairs to some extent, after spending most of his life in the same community, and a little city where gossip is an elegant occupation. This person had made bad investments; that one was crippled by the necessity to pay a son's debts; this couple did not live in harmony, the husband was said to be infatuated with a dancer. The fact that so much of their own fault entered into people's misfortunes, while rousing rage, forced him to pity, because the limitation of their intelligence had so much to do with people's faults. He was in fact oppressed by the sense of the limits set to all the lives around him in this beautiful little Florence, his home, his love, sometimes his despair: the narrow actual opportunities after the boundless illusions and hopes of youth; the limited outlook, the limited breathing-room, the limited fortunes. Bars at the windows, closed doors on every hand. It was with the feeling that Miss Seymour was no more truly in holiday spirits than was he that he turned toward her, as toward a spot of shadow amid too fervid sunshine. It would be more congenial, drifting with her to the languid measure of this very modern, morbidly emotional waltz, knowing that, whatever their light talk, they alike felt life to be a sad affair, than going through livelier evolutions with a young person who would secretly desire him to flatter and flirt. An instinct founded less upon male conceit than knowledge of his world drove the young bachelor determined to remain unattached to seek in preference women who would found no smallest hope upon his notice of them. So, keeping at the edge of the room in order to be out of the way of the dancers, he started on his way to Miss Seymour, while Charlie, whose mood was as different from Gerald's as was his eye,--that brown eye which looked upon the world as a barrel of very passable oysters, of which he would open as many as he could get hold of,--started after. The approach of a stormily whirling couple, waltzing _all'_ _italiana_, and then another and still another following, forced them to suspend their journey. While they prudently waited, "Who is that?" came from Charlie in a voice of acute curiosity. Gerald, after half a glance at him, mechanically looked in the same direction. There stood at the door opening from the reception-room an unknown.