but he insisted that I must see you in person.” He added this gravely, deliberately allowing her to perceive that he understood his reception.

[5]

Diana bit her lip to suppress a smile, and was conscious that Jacob Eaton was openly hilarious. She was half angry, too, because Trench had put her in the wrong by recognizing her discourtesy and treating it courteously. Beyond the circle of the lamplight was the critical audience of her home-life, her father’s stately figure and white head, Mrs. Eaton’s elderly elegance, and Jacob’s worldly wisdom. She looked at Trench with growing coldness.

“Thank you,” she said, “shall I give you a receipt?”

He met her eye an instant, and she saw that he was fully cognizant of her sarcasm. “As you please,” he replied unmoved.

She felt herself rebuked again, and her anger kindled unreasonably against the man who was smarting under her treatment. She went to the table, and taking a sheet of folded note-paper wrote a receipt and signed it, handing it to him with a slight haughty inclination of the head which was at once an acknowledgment and a dismissal.

But again he met her with composure. He took the paper, folded it twice and put it in his pocketbook, then he bade her good evening and, passing Eaton with scarcely a glance, bowed to Colonel Royall and went out, his awkward figure in its rough tweed suit having made a singular effect in the old-fashioned[6] elegance of Colonel Royall’s house, an effect that fretted Diana’s pride, for it had seemed to her that, as he passed, he had overshadowed her own father and dwarfed Jacob Eaton. Yet, at the time, she thought of none of these things. She pushed the offending pennies across the table.

[6]

“Cousin Jinny,” she said carelessly, “there are some Peter pence for your dago beggars.”

Cousin Jinny gathered up the pennies and dropped them thoughtfully into the little gold-linked purse on her chatelaine. For years she had been contributing a yearly subsidy to the ever increasing family of a former gondolier, the unforgotten grace of whose slender legs had haunted her memory for twenty years, during which period she had been the recipient of annual announcements of twins and triplets, whose arrivals invariably punctuated peculiarly unremunerative years.

“That man,” she said, referring to Trench and not the gondolier, “that man is an anarchist.”

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