“My name is----” he made a pause. He looked at the interested countenance beside him, a sense of the ludicrous mingling with his suspicious distrust of all strangers and foreigners. What did it matter what he said to a little impostor like this? “Oliver,” he added, with a laugh. He almost thought the little fellow, though not an Englishman, must see the incongruity, the absurdity, of associating the name of Oliver with such a person as Harry Joscelyn. It suddenly became a practical joke to him, a masquerade which everyone must see through. “O---- livr,” said little Thompson, with a long emphasis upon the first letter, and a hurried slur over the rest; “that right? alright! Mister O--lvr.” “Not Mister,” said Harry, growing benevolent as he felt a little amusement steal over him, and he tried to give his new acquaintance the _nuance_ of sound which divides the Mr. of English use and wont from the two distinct syllables of which Paolo was so fond. They grew friends over this attempt at unity of pronunciation, or rather Harry permitted himself to grow friendly, and to ask himself what harm this little foreigner could do him--a little hop o’ my thumb, whom he could lift in one hand. As he laughed over his new friend’s attempt to catch the difference of sound, his friendly feeling increased. He felt his superiority more and more, and in that superiority his suspicions melted away. As for little Paolo he took everything amiably. He had no objection to be laughed at. “You mean not bad,” he said, “I know; you mean not to make angry. Laugh, it is a way of us English. My father was an Englishman. I never know him; he was died before I am born; but I too am an English by origin. It is for that I have my place. I am Interpreter. I put what you say in Italian. I put what one would say to you in English. Thus I please to both,” said the little man with lively satisfaction; and he laughed when Harry laughed with genuine good faith. Perhaps it was the reaction from his past despondency which made Harry laugh so much, perhaps the little bravado of a stranger feeling himself gazed at and isolated among a crowd of people alien to him. He attracted the eyes of all the guests at the table-d’hôte especially of some Americans who had come in late, and one other Englishman who regarded him gloomily from the other end of the table, and concluded that his countryman was having too much to drink, but that it was not his business. Harry was not taking too much to drink; he was making wry faces at the sour Nostrali, which was the only wine provided without a special order. Harry did not understand any wine except Port and Sherry, and he despised the sour stuff of which he took one big gulp and no more; he did not know what else to order, and he did not like to mix up Paolo in his affairs so far as to ask his advice on this point. Paolo for his part was drinking a little of his wine in a tumblerful of water, not without some alarm lest the _eau rougie_ should