Instead of two or three dozen small tables, scattered among the palms of the winter garden, their hostess had preferred to construct a great oval board around the aquarium. The arrangement made it a little easier for Selwyn and Mrs. Ruthven. He talked to his dinner partner until she began to respond in monosyllables, which closed each subject that he opened and wearied him as much as he was boring her. But Bradley Harmon, the man on her right, evidently had better fortune; and presently Selwyn found himself with nobody to talk to, which came as near to embarrassing him as anything could, and which so enraged his hostess that she struck his partner's name from her lists for ever. People were already glancing at him askance in sly amusement or cold curiosity. Then he did a thing which endeared him to Mrs. T. West Minster and to her two disconsolate children. "Mrs. Ruthven," he said, very naturally and pleasantly, "I think perhaps we had better talk for a moment or two--if you don't mind." She said quietly, "I don't mind," and turned with charming composure. Every eye shifted to them, then obeyed decency or training; and the slightest break in the gay tumult was closed up with chatter and laughter. "Plucky," said Sandon Craig to his fair neighbour; "but by what chance did our unfortunate hostess do it?" "She's usually doing it, isn't she? What occupies me," returned his partner, "is how on earth Alixe could have thrown away that adorable man for Jack Ruthven. Why, he is already trying to scramble into Rosamund Fane's lap--the horrid little poodle!--always curled up on the edge of your skirt!" She stared at Mrs. Ruthven across the crystal reservoir brimming with rose and ivory-tinted water-lilies. "That girl is marked for destruction," she said slowly; "the gods have done their work already." But whatever Alixe had been, whatever she now was, she showed to her little world only a pale brunette symmetry--a strange and changeless lustre, varying as little as the moon's phases; and like that burnt-out planet, reflecting any flame that flared until her clear, young beauty seemed pulsating with the promise of hidden fire. Selwyn, outwardly amiable and formal, was saying in a low voice: "My dinner partner is quite impossible, you see; and I happen to be here as a filler in--commanded to the presence only a few minutes ago. It's a pardonable error; I bear no malice. But I'm sorry for you." There was a silence; Alixe straightened her slim figure, and turned; but young Innis, who had taken her in, had become confidential with Mrs. Fane. As for Selwyn's partner, she probably divined his conversational designs on her, but she merely turned her bare shoulder a trifle more unmistakably and continued her gossip with Bradley Harmon. Alixe broke a tiny morsel from her bread, sensible of the tension.