zing for a child's prank,
that Pietro had in fact, already invited him to the dinner and had only
just informed her of the fact. Lucile had assured her, of course, that
this addition to the company would cause not the slightest
inconvenience, served on the contrary to bring it up to the number that
had originally been counted upon.

When LaChaise arrived the discovery that he talked no English at all
beyond a few rudimentary phrases, a fact which normally would have seemed
calamitous, was now merely treated as an added feature of the evening. He
and Novelli were in the midst of an animated discussion when they
arrived. They stuck together in the drawing-room as if locked in the same
pair of handcuffs and seating arrangements were hastily revised so that
they might go on talking in untroubled mutual absorption straight through
the dinner. Rush being placed handily by, where he could come to the
rescue in case of need.

It was only the extremest surface of Mary sitting at the head of the
table in Paula's place (which once had been her own) that was engaged
with her unforeseen duties as hostess. And yet in a way, the whole of her
consciousness had been drawn to the surface. The strong interior
excitement that had been burning in her during all this day of her
home-coming, the rising conviction that life at home might turn out to be
something very different indeed from the thing that it had, down in New
York, looked like, the blend of foreboding with anticipation that
accompanied it, and finally a sense of the imminence of something
important, not quite to be accounted for by the quarrel between her
father and his wife,--all this emotional reaction found its outlet during
the long dinner in a quite unusual vivacity. Her sphere of influence
spread down the table until it embraced a full half the length of it on
both sides and those just beyond the reach of it, aware that they were
missing something, listened but distractedly to the talk of their more
remote partners. And while she was doing all this she managed with her
left hand, as it were, to, keep going a vivid little confidential
flirtation with the Stannard boy, Graham, a neighbor and a contemporary
of hers just back from service on a destroyer.

The thing that stimulated her to all this was a consciousness of her
father's intense awareness of her. She had been deliberately evasive of
him since his quarrel with Paula. What he wanted of her she knew as well
as if he