"When the port had been served and the ladies had risen to leave the men to their cigars, Sir John Catnall conducted the Roumanian-Persian combination to the drawing-room door, clicked his heels, bent his back in a salaam, and with a certain anxious look on his face hurried back to the dining-room, and seeing the seat next Lord Arbuckle temporarily empty slid into it, laid his bronzed hand on his host's thin, white, blue-veined wrist, and said in a voice trembling with suppressed emotion: "'We got your wife's note and came at once, although our boxes are still unpacked. I could hardly get through the dinner I have been so anxious, but we arrived so late I could not ask your wife--indeed you were already moving in to dinner when your man brought us in. I am in London, as you know, to consult an oculist, for my eyesight is greatly impaired, and he called professionally just as I was leaving my lodgings.' Then bending over Lord Arbuckle he said in a voice tremulous with emotion, 'Tell me now about Eliza; is she really as badly off as your wife thinks?' "Arbuckle had learned one thing during his long life with Catherine, never, as you Americans say, to 'give her away.' The identity of the partly blind, sunburned man, with half a cataract over each eye, who was gazing at him so intently awaiting an answer from his lips, was as much of a mystery to him as was the particular malady with which the unknown Eliza was afflicted or the contents of his wife's letter. Instantly Lord Arbuckle's face took on a grave and serious expression. "'Yes,' he answered slowly; 'yes, I regret to say that it is all true.' "'Good God!' ejaculated the stranger, 'you don't say so. Terrible! Terrible!' and without another word he rose from his seat, tarried for a moment at the mantel gazing into the coals, and then slowly rejoined the ladies. "When the last guest had departed Arbuckle, who had been smothering a fire of indignation over the stranger's inquiry and at the uncomfortable position in which his wife had placed him, owing to her never consulting him about her guests or her correspondence, shut the door of the drawing-room so the servants could not hear and burst out with: "'What damned nonsense it is, Catherine, to invite people who bore you to death with questions you can't answer! Who the devil is Eliza, and what's the matter with her?' "'Who wanted to know, my dear?' "'That horribly dressed, red-faced person who sat half-way down the table, next to that frightful frump in a turban from Persia.' "'I don't know any Eliza!' "'But you said you did.' "'I said I did?' "'Yes; he told me so. You wrote him! Now be good enough, Catherine, to let me know in advance who you----' "'But I never told anybody about Eliza; never heard of her.' "'You did, I tell you. You told that fellow who winks all the time, with some beastly thing the matter with his eyes.'