"Ah! but it is," retorted he, quickly. "My allegiance is to the goddess of 'winged words'; to the glorious mother of fictitious speech; to Pasht, the goddess of splendid, golden lying. A lie is only the truth agreeably and effectively told. _Vive la fausseté!_" "Doubtless each interprets Pasht's attributes according to his own light," Herman observed, a little grimly. He was only half-pleased with Fenton's badinage. But the latter, apparently, did not feel the thrust. "Let him alone," Helen said, "he believes in nothing; he is a genuine Pagan." "You are wrong in your idea," was Fenton's swift reply. "A true Pagan must have a belief in some god to take from his shoulders the burden of personal responsibility, or he cannot be joyous as a Pagan should. However, to-night I make myself believe that I believe something, so it comes to much the same thing." Helen turned and looked at him, attracted by some subtle quality in his voice. He was sitting sidewise in his chair, holding an ivory paper-knife in his slender fingers. His cheeks burned, his eyes were bright, his lips red. He had shaken off the depression which oppressed him earlier in the evening. An air of joyous, quivering excitement pervaded him. He threw up his head with a characteristic gesture, and looked about him like one who has conquered in some desperate conflict. "Come," the hostess said, wondering in what inward struggle he had come off victor; "you promised to assist me with the coffee. I make no boast of my house or my hospitality, gentlemen," she added, with a charming glance around, "but I warn you in advance that not to admire my coffee is to lose my friendship forever." In answer to her ring, a servant brought in a small mortar and a pretty little bowl of whole coffee, delicately browned, and scarcely cold from its roasting. Arthur, who seemed acquainted with Mrs. Greyson's methods of procedure, began to pound the berries, roasted to perfect crispness, in the ebony mortar, reducing them to an almost impalpable powder, which diffused upon the air the entrancing odor dear to the nostrils of all artists. The servant meantime had provided tiny cups, a little copper ibrik and an alcohol lamp over which simmered a vessel of boiling water. "Coffee should be prepared only over coals of perfumed wood," Helen remarked as she measured into the ibrik the small spoonful of coffee dust designed for a single cup. "But alcohol is the next best thing, it burns with such a supernatural flame." She put into the ibrik a measure of boiling water, rested it an instant over the flame to restore the heat lost in the cooler copper, and then poured the beverage into the egg-shell cup destined for it.