To Viola the strange faces seemed unlovely and forbidding. She had met few people in her life, and this sudden plunge into society was a portentous experience. Pale and silent under the glare of the chandelier, she nibbled at her food, having neither heart nor courage to speak. When she raised her eyes she saw the young man opposite--Mrs. Seymour had presented him as "Bart Nelson, our prize young man"--staring at her over his plate with a steady, ruminating air. As he met her eyes for the second time, he said: "Off your feed?" And then, in reply to the colonel's look of uneasy inquiry, jerked his head toward Viola and said: "Mrs. Seymour ain't goin' to lose anything by her." Mrs. Seymour replied that she wanted somebody like that to even things off against such an appetite as Mr. Nelson's. The laugh then was on the prize young man, and he joined in it as heartily as the others. Miss Mercer, who, it appeared, was a school-teacher, and who had the tight-mouthed visage and dominant voice of those who habitually instruct the young, said she guessed Miss Reed was trying to put Mrs. Seymour off her guard; it was a case of making a good impression in the beginning. The voice of the little girl here rose with penetrating suddenness: "She don't ever eat much. She's too thin." Viola, suddenly the objective point of interest of the table, felt herself growing red and embarrassed. That she might hide her face from this alarming concentration of attention, she pretended to drop her napkin, and bent down to get it. The landlady, with a tact that her appearance belied, saw that the girl was uncomfortable, and diverted the conversation. It swelled, and was tossed back and forth about the table with much laughter and jest of a personal nature. There were but six people in the house besides Mrs. Seymour, and these seemed intimately conversant with one another's histories and individual foibles. The school-teacher was attacked about an admirer known as "Little Willie," and after a moment of confusion she made a spirited return on the young man beside her, whom every one called Charley, but who had been presented to Viola as Mr. Ryan. Charley's infatuation for a lady who had ridden a bicycle in a recent vaudeville performance seemed to be a subject of gossip, and the school-teacher added further poignancy to the tale by relating how this lady, having made an appointment to lunch with Charley, had failed to keep the tryst. The glee roused over Charley's discomfiture was loud and deep. A heavily bearded man who sat at the foot of the table, and was ceremoniously addressed as Mr. Betts, lay back in his chair and roared. "Oh, Charley!" he gasped, when he had recovered his composure, "she got you straight in the slats that time." His wife, at the other end of the table, said with a prim air: "What I'd like to know is where Miss Mercer hears all these stories."