The talk was diverted here by some laughing remark which led on to a train of gay badinage. The German tried to bring the conversation back to serious levels, but in vain. "Oh, what fustian we've given ourselves up to to-night," laughed Rangely. "It amuses me to hear you fellows discuss religion," Tom Bently observed. "You wander round the subject as aimlessly as the young women in the first half hour of a Harvard symphony concert." "Never you mind, Bently," rejoined Ainsworth. "You are sure of coming out all right; the gods are bound to protect humbug, for on it depends their own existence." They drifted in little groups to different parts of the studio, admiring this or that bit of grace or beauty. Then the German, who was a professional musician, tuned an old mandolin with which a Venetian lover some star-lit night centuries ago, may have serenaded his loved one from his gondola; and to its trembling accompaniment sang a quaint chansonette, his Teutonic accent making havoc among its liquid Italian syllables. Then Rangely possessed himself of a strange African instrument, a crooked gourd, hollowed and strung with twisted tree fibers, and joined to the notes of the mandolin, its weird, cicada-like harshness. The duet moved Bently to clear a miscellaneous collection of articles from the lid of a spinnet of the time of Louis XIV., upon which be-powdered and be-patched dames, long forgotten, had strummed pretty little tinkling tunes, while all about them other marionette-like ladies and gallants played at little tinkling loves, as pretty and as empty. The three instruments, so strangely matched, went off together in a variety of music, imparting to every thing an uncanny, ghostly flavor, as if these airs came in wild echoes from the shores of some dead past. "Oh, stop that," Herman cried, at last. "It's too melancholy. Your instruments are all dead; and it's no use trying to get live music out of them." For reply the German led off in a drearisome minor folk-tune, Rangely and Bently improvising their parts with some skill, albeit not always with perfect harmony. "Ye Gods!" cried Ainsworth, seizing the mandolin out of the player's grasp. "Is this a Hottentot funeral? Here, Fred, give me that diabolical gourd; it is haunted by the soul of a Caffre medicine man." "I say, fellows," spoke Rangely, as the din subsided, "I move we make this a funeral, by breaking up the Pagans. Of course there is nothing to hinder our meeting round at each other's places whenever we want to; but we've either got to turn Fenton out or break up. I, for one, am coward enough to prefer to break up." "So say I," said Herman. "When once a circle like this is broken, there is an end of it. It can't be patched together."