e made their appearance, with the
corresponding niceties of 'Just one, please,' 'Well, perhaps a
cigarette might be enjoyable,' 'I know men like a cigar,' 'After you,
old man,' and all those various utterances which tickle the ear,
creating in the speaker's breast the feeling of saying the right thing
and doing it rather well.

Throughout the dinner the daughter of the house had sat practically
without a remark, and even when chorus effects were achieved by the
rest, remained with almost immobile features, merely glancing from one
to another, momentarily interested or openly bored. Several times the
American had looked furtively at the arresting face, marred by too
apparent mental resentment, but the barricade of Johnston Smyth's
angular personality had been too powerful for him to surmount with
anything but the most superficial persiflage.

He had watched her take a cigarette, accepting a light from Smyth, who
surrounded the action with a ludicrous dignity, when she looked up and
met his eyes.

'Mr. Selwyn,' she said, speaking with the same rapidity of phrasing
that had both held and exasperated him before, 'we are all waiting for
the verdict of the Man from America.'

'Over there,' he smiled, 'it is customary to take evidence before
giving a verdict.'

'Good,' boomed the resolutionist; 'very good!'

'Then,' said Lady Durwent, 'we seven shall constitute a jury.'

'Order!' Johnston Smyth rose to his feet and hammered the table with a
bottle. '_Oyez, oyez_, you hereby swear that you shall well and truly
try'----

'Can't,' said Norton Pyford, pulling himself up; 'I'm prejudiced.'

'For or against?'

'Against the culprit.'

'My discordant friend,' said Smyth, producing a second bottle from an
unsuspected source and making it disappear mysteriously, 'means that he
is prejudiced against England. Am I right, sir?'

'Not exactly,' drawled the composer. 'I don't mind England--but I
think the English are awful.'

'That is a nice point,' said Lady Durwent.

'Ah,' broke in Madame Carlotti, 'but, much as I detest the English, I
hate England more. _Nom de Dieu_! I--a daughter of the Mediterranean,
where the sun ees so rarely a stranger, and the sky and the water it
ees always blue. In Italy one lives because she ees alive--it ees
sufficient. Here it ees always gray, gray--always g-r-ray. When the
sun comes--_sacramento_! he sees his mistake and goes queek away. Ah,
Signor Selwyn, it ees _desolant_ that