What was our surprise, on entering the dining-room some minutes after nine o’clock the next evening--for Antony dined late--to see the table laid for four! And then a lady came in--a tall, dark young lady, a strange and unusual lady with a flash of very white teeth for a smile and a gardenia alight on the wing of her sleek black hair! I am afraid Tarlyon and I must have seemed very rude, for we were so surprised that we stared. The white teeth flashed at us. We bowed. “My wife,” said Antony. We bowed again. She was the sort of woman one bowed to. Antony’s wife! “Diavalen,” said Antony abruptly, “this is Lord Tarlyon and Mr. Trevor.” Diavalen--Lady Poole!--said nothing. With that wonderful trick of flashing those wonderful teeth she didn’t need to say anything. “She’s a Creole,” said Antony, as we sat at the table. He said it as he might have said that she was an orange. Those white teeth flashed at me, and I smiled back, feeling an ass. There didn’t seem much to say about her being a Creole.... I don’t know how Tarlyon felt about it, but it took me some time to get my wind. “My wife,” says Antony! Never a word nor a sign about being married--to that glorious, dark, alien creature with the flashing teeth and sleek black hair! Diavalen the Creole! Just like Red Antony to marry a Creole called Diavalen and then spring her on to you with a “my wife.” I remembered Antony once saying, years and years ago: “Never give away gratuitous information, old boy.” But there are limits. And one of them is to have a wife with flashing teeth, a gardenia in her hair, and a name like Diavalen, and then throw her in with the soup. Red Antony was never what you might call a good host: not, particularly, at the beginning of dinner. To-night he was morose. But Tarlyon talked--to Lady Poole. It would take more than a lovely Creole to baffle Tarlyon. He seemed to have inside information as to what were the subjects best calculated to excite interest in a Creole married to a morose English baronet with ginger hair. Diavalen did not talk. But one did not realise that she wasn’t talking, for she was wonderfully expressive with her smiling, flashing, teeth. She seemed to have discovered the art of using teeth for something besides eating.