As the dinner waned, one of the footmen brought him a card, on which Watts had written: “They want me to say a few words of welcome and of Dot. Will you respond?” Peter read the note and then wrote below it: “Dear Miss D’Alloi: You see the above. May I pay you a compliment? Only one? Or will it embarrass you?” When the card came back a new line said: “Dear Peter: I am not afraid of your compliment, and am very curious to hear it.” Peter said, “Tell Mr. D’Alloi that I will with pleasure.” Then he tucked the card in his pocket. That card was not going to be wasted. So presently the glasses were filled up, even Peter saying, “You may give me a glass,” and Watts was on his feet. He gave “our friends” a pleasant welcome, and after apologizing for their absence, said that at least, “like the little wife in the children’s play, ‘We too have not been idle,’ for we bring you a new friend and introduce her to you to-night.” Then Peter rose, and told the host: “Your friends have been grieved at your long withdrawal from them, as the happy faces and welcome we tender you this evening, show. We feared that the fascination of European art, with its beauty and ease and finish, had come to over-weigh the love of American nature, despite its life and strength and freshness; that we had lost you for all time. But to-night we can hardly regret even this long interlude, if to that circumstance we owe the happiest and most charming combination of American nature and European art—Miss D’Alloi.” Then there was applause, and a drinking of Miss D’Alloi’s health, and the ladies passed out of the room—to enjoy themselves, be it understood, leaving the men in the gloomy, quarrelsome frame of mind it always does. Peter apparently became much abstracted over his cigar, but the abstraction was not perhaps very deep, for he was on his feet the moment Watts rose, and was the first to cross the hall into the drawing-room. He took a quick glance round the room, and then crossed to a sofa. Dorothy and—and some one else were sitting on it. “Speaking of angels,” said Dorothy. “I wasn’t speaking of you,” said Peter. “Only thinking.” “There,” said Leonore. “Now if Mrs. Grinnell had only heard that.” Peter looked a question, so Leonore continued: “We were talking about you. I don’t understand you. You are so different from what I had been told to think you. Every one said you were very silent and very uncomplimentary, and never joked, but you are not a bit as they said, and I thought you had probably changed, just as you had about the clothes. But Mrs. Grinnell says she never heard you make a joke or a compliment in her life, and that at the Knickerbocker they call you ‘Peter, the silent.’ You are a great puzzle.”