The devil was in him. He got up with a grin. “I doubt whether you’ll be very good company! Oh, let’s see, where’s that revolver? Oh, I gave it back to Louis, so I did! Our esteemed friend ought to be here in half an hour. Do you happen to know that he and Lucinda have been to the Lido together this afternoon? No, you don’t? Oh, yes! My friend Alessandro and I saw them embarking. Doesn’t that fact add a further interest to this evening? But look at the room—the table! Shall we not outshine the Frost millions to-night—you and I, Julius?” “It isn’t my affair, thank God!” “Oh, that’s as it may turn out! _Au revoir_, then, in half an hour!” He succeeded in leaving me in about as bewildered a state of mind as I have ever been in in all my life; I, who have often had to decide whether a politician was an honest man or not!—— CHAPTER XXIII THE BANQUET SINCE I was not to play host that evening, I decided to let Arsenio be first on the gaudy scene which he had prepared. He should receive the other guests; he should take undivided responsibility for the decorations. I waited until I heard him come down and speak to Louis, and even until I heard—as I very well could, in my little bedroom adjoining the _salon_—Louis announcing first “Monsieur Froost,” and then—no, it was fat old Amedeo who effected the second announcement, arrogating to himself the rights of an old family servant—that of the most excellent and noble Signora Donna Lucinda Valdez. Thereupon I entered, Amedeo favoring me with no laudatory epithets, but leaving me to content myself with Louis’ brief “Monsieur Reelinton.” Lucinda was in splendor; she was—as I, at least, had never before seen her—a grown woman in a grown woman’s evening finery. Through all her wanderings she must have dragged this gown about, a relic of her pre-war status—for all I knew, part of the _trousseau_ of the prospective Mrs. Waldo Rillington! But it did not look seriously out of fashion. (If I remember right, women dressed on substantially the same lines just before the war as they did in the first months after it.) It was a white gown, simple but artistic, of sumptuous material. She wore no ornaments—it was not difficult to conjecture the reason for that—only her favorite scarlet flower in her fair hair; yet the effect of her was one of magnificence—of a restrained, tantalizing richness, both of body and of raiment.