d of the approaching date of Ellie
Vanderlyn's return, and of the searching truths she was storing up for
that lady's private ear, when she noticed a gondola turning its
prow toward the steps below the balcony. She leaned over, and a tall
gentleman in shabby clothes, glancing up at her as he jumped out, waved
a mouldy Panama in joyful greeting.

"Streffy!" she exclaimed as joyfully; and she was half-way down the
stairs when he ran up them followed by his luggage-laden boatman.

"It's all right, I suppose?--Ellie said I might come," he explained in
a shrill cheerful voice; "and I'm to have my same green room with the
parrot-panels, because its furniture is already so frightfully stained
with my hair-wash."

Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction which his
presence always produced in his friends. There was no one in the world,
they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and delightful as Streffy; no
one who combined such outspoken selfishness with such imperturbable good
humour; no one who knew so well how to make you believe he was being
charming to you when it was you who were being charming to him.

In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the value
more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for Susy another
attraction of which he was probably unconscious. It was that of being
the one rooted and stable being among the fluid and shifting figures
that composed her world. Susy had always lived among people so
denationalized that those one took for Russians generally turned out to
be American, and those one was inclined to ascribe to New York proved to
have originated in Rome or Bucharest. These cosmopolitan people, who, in
countries not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in
hotels where the guests were as international as the waiters, had
inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over the whole
face of Europe, and according to every code that attempts to regulate
human ties. Strefford, too, had his home in this world, but only one
of his homes. The other, the one he spoke of, and probably thought
of, least often, was a great dull English country-house in a northern
county, where a life as monotonous and self-contained as his own was
chequered and dispersed had gone on for generation after generation;
and it was the sense of that house, and of all it typified even to his
vagrancy and irreverence, which, coming out now and then in his talk, or
in his