But Conover, subtly aware of her emotion, knew he had somehow blundered. He saw how far he had deflected from his original plan of stony self-control. He knew it was the few glasses of wine he had drunk which, while in no way befuddling his brain, had given his tongue an undue looseness. A wave of self-contempt passed over him; sharp, unaccustomed. A manservant bent to fill one of his glasses. Caleb, recalling the etiquette-book maxim, clapped his hand hastily over the top of the goblet. The gesture was sudden and carried with it an unintended force. The wrought stem of the thin Venetian glass snapped. Conover, purple with angry mortification, surveyed the wreck he had wrought. Then, pulling himself together, he looked about the board, the glare behind his forced grin challenging any and every eye that might dare to show derision. “It doesn’t matter, Mr. Standish!” he called down the table to his host. “I’ll save the pieces and send you a whole set like it to-morrow. Where’d’you buy it?” “It is of no consequence at all,” returned Standish, the consumption spots on his cheek bones burning a little darker red than usual. He turned to the neighbor with whom he had been talking, and with his usual dry cough took up the shattered thread of conversation. But Caleb was resolved not to permit his overtures at restitution to be slighted. “Where’d you buy it?” he repeated, raising his voice a little, “I want to know so I--” “It is of no importance at all,” protested Standish, guiltily avoiding his sister-in-law’s saintly gaze. “I--” “But I want to know,” persisted Caleb. “Where’d the glasses come from?” “Why,” smiled Standish with a painful effort at careless good-nature, “I believe they’re some we picked up in Venice once. But they--” “Well, I’ll send there for ’em, then,” promised Caleb, his defiant glance once more sweeping the oval of faces. Strangely enough, everyone seemed to be talking at once, and no one seemed to be looking either at him or at Standish. In cool, level, unhurried tones they were speaking; these denizens of an unknown world, into whose presence he fought his way unasked, unwanted. Their language was not his language; their thoughts were not his thoughts. They were moving on as if he did not exist. Caleb remembered having read in some newspaper’s “reprint” column, how an oyster calmly glazes over the grain of irritating sand that has found unwelcome refuge within its shell. He felt humiliatingly like the nucleus of such a pearl. And with the thought, and the waning of the wine’s effects, came wholesome anger. “I’ve got more cash than the whole crowd of ’em put together,” he told himself fiercely.