The girl's eyes had narrowed, and were no longer sparkling, but steady--almost to the point of dullness; her lower lip was full, and too scarlet for the upper one, which chided its sister for the wanton admission of slumbering passion; and her voice was abrupt. He almost cried out '_Legato, legato_,' to coax back the lilt which had caressed his ear a moment before. He was dimly conscious that dinner was announced, and that amidst a babel of tongues he was being led by, or was leading, Lady Durwent into the dining-room. He heard the resolutionist and Dunckley both talking at once, and felt the melancholy languor of Pyford floating like incense through the air. He had an obscure recollection of sitting down next to his hostess; that the table, like Arthur's, was a round one; that Johnston Smyth was seated beside Miss Durwent and was ogling one of Lady Durwent's maids. Then he remembered that he had heard some voice in his ear for several minutes past, and, growing curious, took a surreptitious glance, to find that it belonged to Madame Carlotti. 'Meester Selwyn,' she said indignantly, 'you have not been listening to me.' 'That is true, signora,' he said; 'but I have been thinking of you.' 'Yes?' she purred, leaning towards him. 'What did you thought?' He turned squarely to her in an impassioned counterfeit of frankness. 'Are all Italian women beautiful?' he murmured. 'Hush-sh!' Her hand touched his beneath the table, reprovingly and tenderly. 'Mr. Selwyn,' said Lady Durwent, 'you have not tasted your soup.' CHAPTER V. THE OLYMPIANS THUNDER. I. Lady Durwent was blessed in the possession of a cook whose artistry was beyond question, if the same could not be said of the guests to whom she so frequently ministered. She was a descendant of the French, that race which makes everything tend towards development of the soul, and consequently looks upon a meal as something of a sacrament. She prepared a dinner with a balance of contrast and climax that a composer might show in writing a tone poem. On this eventful evening, therefore, the dinner-party, stimulated by her art and by potent wines (gazing with long-necked dignity at the autocratic whisky-decanter), rapidly assumed a crescendo and an accelerando--the two things for which a hostess listens. H. Stackton Dunckley had held the resolutionist in a duel of language--a combat with broadswords--and honours were fairly even. The short-sleeved Johnston Smyth had waged futurist warfare against the modernist Pyford, while the Honourable Miss Durwent sat helplessly between them, with as little chance of asserting her rights as the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. The American had held his own in badinage with the daughter of Italy on one side and his hostess on the other, the latter, however, being too skilled in entertaining to do more than murmur a few encouragements to the spontaneity that so palpably existed.