"So you are to carry Cynthia away?" Minot heard her saying to Lord Harrowby. "Such a lot of my friends have married into the peerage. Indeed, I have sometimes thought you English have no other pastime save that of slipping engagement rings on hands across the sea." A soft voice spoke in Minot's ear. "Mine," Mr. Paddock was saying. "Not bad, eh? But look at that Englishman. Why should I have sat up all last night writing lines to try on him? Can you tell me that?" Lord Harrowby, indeed, seemed oblivious of Mrs. Bruce's little bon mot. He hemmed and hawed, and said he was a lucky man. But he did not mean that he was a lucky man because he had the privilege of hearing Mrs. Bruce. Mr. Bruce slipped out of the shadows into the weariness of another formal dinner. Mrs. Bruce glittered, and he wrote the checks. He was a scraggly little man who sometimes sat for hours at a time in silence. There were those unkind enough to say that he sought back, trying to recall the reason that had led him to marry Mrs. Bruce. When he beheld Miss Cynthia Meyrick, and knew that he was to take her in to dinner, Mr. Bruce brightened perceptibly. None save a blind and deaf man could have failed to. Cocktails consumed, the party turned toward the dining-room. Except for the Meyricks, Martin Wall, Lord Harrowby and Paddock, Dick Minot knew none of them. There were a couple of colorless men from New York who, when they died, would be referred to as "prominent club men," a horsy girl from Westchester, an ex-ambassador's wife and daughter, a number of names from Boston and Philadelphia with their respective bearers. And last but not least the two Bond girls from Omaha--blond, lovely, but inclined to be snobbish even in that company, for their mother was a Van Reypan, and Van Reypans are rare birds in Omaha and elsewhere. Mr. Minot took in the elder of the Bond girls, and found that Cynthia Meyrick sat on his left. He glanced at her throat as they sat down. It was bare of ornament. And then he beheld, sparkling in her lovely hair, the perfect diamonds of Chain Lightning's Collar. As he turned back to the table he caught the eye of Mr. Martin Wall. Mr. Wall's eye happened to be coming away from the same locality. The girl from Omaha gossiped of plays and players, like a dramatic page from some old Sunday newspaper. "I'm mad about the stage," she confided. "Of course, we get all the best shows in Omaha. Why, Maxine Elliott and Nat Goodwin come there every year." Mr. Minot, New Yorker, shuddered. Should he tell her of the many and active years in the lives of these two since they visited any town together? No. What use? On the other side of him a sweet voice spoke: "I presume you know, Mr. Minot, that Mrs. Bruce has the reputation of being the wittiest hostess in San Marco?" "I have heard as much." Minot smiled into Cynthia Meyrick's eyes. "When does her act go on?"