Dressed in the extreme of fashion, as fashion is known from Fourteenth Street southward, his gray, almost white, suits always fresh from the pressing-iron, and his flowered tie and ever evident gay silk handkerchief always glaringly new, this dapper, dark young man was unmistakably Neapolitan. His glossy black hair clustered tight over his forehead; his brown skin shone as if rubbed with oil; his eyes danced like merry, but sinister, bits of coal, and his too red lips were continuously, loosely, patterned to a smile that was more nearly contemptuous than good-humored. For at least a part of every evening this Italian, who always entered the house from the rear and without the formality of knocking, sat in the kitchen, drinking his beer with infinite leisure and, in the intervals of her discussions in the parlor, condescended to talk, lazily, with Rose. "Who is he?" asked Violet, on what was perhaps the fifth of his visits that she had happened to observe. Celeste, to whom the question had been addressed, shrugged her smooth shoulders. "He ees Angel," she answered. "He don't look like one." "No, not mooch, but hees name, eet ees that: Rafael Angelelli. Eef he had the moostache, he would be almost 'andsome." "Rose acts like she thought a good deal of him as he is." "But why not?"--Celeste raised her heavy brows. "'e ees 'er sweed'eart." "He is?" repeated Violet, who could not yet understand the masculine lover that would batten upon his conquest. "I notice he pretty nearly lives here, an' he never pays out a cent, an' never seems to work at anything, an' he always wears good clothes." "My child, truly! That is the reason that I have tol' you: 'e ees 'er sweed'eart." "Well, it's queer," said Violet, remembering another caller to whom, though he was a less frequent visitor, Rose was equally attentive. "I don't think he's half as nice as that fellow who comes here in a taxi--the one that always wears a dress-suit an' sits in the back parlor. He's a swell." But at this Celeste grew enigmatic. "Oh," she said, "that ees deeferent"--and would say no more. Nevertheless, it happened, not long afterward, when the black Cassie was absent on her "evening out," that Violet, descending the back stair in unshod feet to steal from the ice-chest--as was her companions' custom--a quiet bottle of the beer that she had come to like, was brought to a palpitating stop by the sound, just then, of Rose's and Angel's voices from the kitchen but a few steps below her. The pair were plainly engaged in an important conversation, the woman hurried and frightened, the man cold and obdurate. "Naw," said the Neapolitan; "I maka naw move out o' deesa house." "But he's coming in now, I tell you," Rose almost supplicated. "He'll be in the back-parlor in half a minute, an' I've got to go in an' talk to him." "Olla righta; you go; I go alonga you."