"At eight-twenty the carriages began to arrive, the Bobby on the beat regulating the traffic; the guests stepping out upon a carpet a little longer and wider than the one Mr. Woods has laid over the sidewalk downstairs. "Once inside, the guests were taken in charge by a line of flunkeys--the women to a cloak room on the right, the men to a basement room on the left--where 'Chawles' handed each man an envelope containing the name of the lady he was to take out to dinner and a diagram designating the location of his seat at his host's table. "By eight-twenty-five all the guests had arrived except General Sir John Catnall and Lady Catnall, who had passed thirty years of their life in India and who had arrived in London but the night before, where they were met by one of Lady Arbuckle's notes inviting them to dinner to meet the Prime Minister. That the dear woman had never laid eyes on the Indian exiles and would not know either of them had she met them on her sidewalk made no difference to her. The butler in announcing their names would help her over this difficulty, as he had done a hundred times before. That the short notice might prevent their putting in an appearance did not trouble her in the least. She knew her London. Prime Ministers were not met with every day, even in the best of houses. "At eight-thirty the two missing guests arrived, Sir John sun-baked to the color of a coolie, and Lady Catnall not much better off so far as complexion was concerned. The climate had evidently done its work. Their queerly cut clothes, too, showed how long they had been out of London. "With their announcement by the flunkey, who bawled out their names so indistinctly that nobody caught them--not even Lady Arbuckle--the guests marched out to dinner, Lord Arbuckle leading with the wife of the Prime Minister; Lady Arbuckle bringing up the rear with the Rajah, without that lady having the dimmest idea as to whether all her guests were present or not. "Sir John found himself next to a Roumanian woman who had spent three-quarters of her life in Persia, and Lady Catnall sat beside a bald-headed scientist from Berlin who spoke English as if he were cracking nuts. None of the four had ever heard of the others' existence. "The dinner was the usual deadly dull affair. The Prime Minister smiled and beamed over his high collar and emitted platitudes that anybody could print without getting the faintest idea of his meaning; and the Rajah peppered and ate with hardly a word of any kind to the lady next him, who talked incessantly; the Scientist jabbered German, completely ignorant of the fact that Lady Catnall could not understand a word of what he said, and the other great personages--especially the women--looked through their lorgnons and studied the menagerie.