The Stanley Cheevers entered—a short, chubby man with a bleached, vacant face tufted with mustache and imperial, devoid of eyebrows, with watery eyes that moved slowly with the motion of his gourd-like head; Mrs. Cheever, voluble, nervous, over-dressed, young with the youth of a child and pretty with the prettiness of a doll. Beecher, who knew them, bowed with a sense of curiosity to Mrs. Cheever, who held him a little with a certain trick she had of opening wide her dark, Oriental eyes; and dropped, with a sense of physical discomfort, the hand that Cheever flabbily pressed into his. "Decidedly, I am going to have a grand little time by myself," he said moodily. "Where the deuce does Rita pick up this bunch?" The Enos Bloodgoods were still agitated as they entered. His lips had not quite banished the scowl, nor her eyes the scorn. "Permit me, my dear," he said, taking off her wrap, and the words struck those who heard them with a sudden chill. He was of the unrelenting type that never loses its temper, but causes others to lose theirs, immovable in his opinions, with a prowling walk, a studied antagonism in his manner, while in his bulgy eyes was an impudent stare which fastened itself like a leech on the person addressed, to draw out his weakness. Elise Bloodgood, who seemed tied to her husband by an invisible leash, had a hunted, resisting quality back of a certain desperate dash which she assumed, rather than felt, in her attitude toward society—just as she touched with red, cheeks that were meant to be simply the background of eyes that were extraordinary, with a lurking sense of tragedy. "Rita, dear, I am almost frantic tonight," she said hastily, in one of those intimate moments of which women avail themselves in the midst of their enemies. "The last rumors are good," said Mrs. Kildair, bending over her ostensibly to arrange her scarf. "Who told you?" "Your brother. Every one downtown believes the panic is stopped. The market has gone up. Gunther and Snelling are Bernard’s personal friends." "Friends?" she said bitterly. "Yes, that’s just the trouble." "Besides, he is coming tonight—you knew?" "Yes, I knew," said Mrs. Bloodgood, with a glance at her husband, who, at the other side of the studio, seemed intent only on examining a reliquary in carved stone. "Then he will tell you himself," said Mrs. Kildair, rearranging a little ornament that made a splash of gold on the black hair of her companion. "Be careful—-don’t talk too much now." "What do I care?" she said rebelliously. "It has got to end sometime."