her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the
tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In a
minute!" and vanished in the crowd.

"Does that mean anything in particular? There's really no hurry."

"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy. March protested that he had
only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his
impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed
between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were
pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers
were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers
too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind
their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one so
effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on
show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting
from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they
moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.

"They all wear corsets," Burnamy explained.

"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March. "I can see that Europe
won't be lost on you in anything. Oh, who's that?" A lady whose costume
expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove
with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. "She must be an American. Do
you know who she is?"

"Yes." He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once
filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies
inspire. "What grace! Is she beautiful?"

"Very." Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March
did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March
to look, but he refused.

"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it;
she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden
off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and
the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled down
her hot cheeks. "There! That is what I call tragedy," said March. "She'll
have to pay for those things."

"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"

"How can I?"

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling
behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial
breakfasts on t