He made another, quite as ridiculous, at the pastry-cook’s where Sir Harry ordered tea. “What’ll you take with it? Call for what you like, only don’t poison yourselves.” Taffy referring his gaze from the buns and confections on the counter to the card in his hands, which was inscribed with words in unknown tongues, made a bold plunge and announced that he would take a “_marasheno_.” This tickled Sir Harry mightily. He ordered the waitress with a wink to “bring the young gentleman a _marasheno_”; and Taffy, who had expected something in the shape of a macaroon, was confronted with a tiny glass of a pale liquor, which, when tasted, in the most surprising manner put sunshine into his stomach and brought tears into his eyes. But under Sir Harry’s quizzical gaze he swallowed it down bravely, and sat gasping and blinking. It may have been that the maraschino induced a haze upon the rest of the afternoon. The gas-lamps were lit when they left the pastry-cook’s and entered a haberdasher’s where Taffy, without knowing why, was fitted with a pair of white kid gloves. Of dinner at the hotel he remembered nothing except that the candles on the tables had red shades, of which the silverware gave funny reflections; that the same waiter flitted about in the penumbra; and that Sir Harry, who was dressed like the waiter, said, “Wake up, young Marasheno! Do you take your coffee black?” “It’s usually pale brown at home,” answered Taffy; at which Sir Harry laughed again. “Black will suit you better to-night,” he said, and poured out a small cupful, which Taffy drank and found exceedingly nasty. And a moment later he was wide awake, and the three were following a young woman along a passage which seemed to run in a complete circle. The young woman flung open a door; they entered a little room with a balcony in front; and the first glorious vision broke on the child with a blaze of light, a crash of music, and the murmur of hundreds of voices. Faces, faces, faces!--faces mounting from the pit below him, up and up to the sky-blue ceiling, where painted goddesses danced and scattered pink roses around the enormous gasalier. Fauns piping on the great curtain, fiddles sawing in the orchestra beneath, ladies in gay silks and jewels leaning over the gilt balconies opposite--which were real, and which a vision only? He turned helplessly to George and Sir Harry. Yes, _they_ were real. But what of Nannizabuloe, and the sand-hills, and the little parsonage to which that very morning he had turned to wave his handkerchief?