Lord Castleton presided at the foot, the post of honor. On his right hand, seated thus low, as befitted new guests, were Lord Francis Onslow, and, “by Jove! Mme. de Vigny herself.” To his left Jacynth, faithful to his place beside Fenella, who had asked the head-waiter some days ago not to move her seat higher, in usual hotel progression, opposite a sour-faced set of ladies, with side-ringlets and warming-pan brooches, who whispered inuendoes about herself that palled as a diversion. She had then innocently preferred new arrivals. So Castleton looked at four freezingly expressionless faces, four pairs of eyes bottling up lightnings. “In for a storm!” he chuckled to himself, rubbing his plump hands under the table. “But who is my lady keeping that empty place for on her other side?” Just then a slight young man, with blond curls clustering thickly on his head, well-waxed mustaches, and a slightly foreign military air about the cut of his clothes and the stiffness of his shoulders, came down the long room with a buoyant step. Fenella’s eyes gleamed as she held out her hand in greeting, which the newcomer pressed with that mingled homage and effusion betraying a stranger to English customs. Onslow’s dark face grew suddenly livid with passion. He made a movement as if about to rise, but was restrained by an imploring touch on his arm, and a murmured entreaty from his companion to be calm. “You see! I obeyed your message on the instant,” said the newcomer to Fenella, in an undertone, audible in the fell silence around. “Last week you said don’t come--it is _stupeed_. Now you say, come!” “Ah, but we have had some new visitors since then, and it is _much_ more amusing.” After which really impudent remark, Fenella leant back, and with a look of infantile innocence on her piquante face, indicated Jacynth. “I want to make you two acquainted. I like my friends to like each other. Mr. Jacynth--Count de Mürger.” The two men’s eyes met. Clitheroe’s gaze gravely observant, De Mürger momentarily taken aback, then bowing with gay readiness, as who should say, “A rival? Come on! measure swords.” Next he looked across and started. It was only a slight start, yet Castleton’s cheeks at once puffed with suppressed mirth. Lucille gave the faintest inclination of her handsome dark head. But Onslow, laying his arms on the table with a cool superiority that in a less well-bred man might be offensive, stared at his enemy full, not stirring a muscle. The cut was direct, cutting De Mürger short in an instinctively begun bow of politely cold recognition. A brilliant smile instantly lightened the young Austrian’s face. He had suspected a trap, but now he knew his ground. An awkward silence ensued. Then Castleton demanded, in nervous accents: “What fish _is_ this, waiter--eh?” “_Tom Dory_, milord,” answered the recently imported Teuton with suave readiness.