he took up her lamp and moved on.

"And here," she said, leaving the oval room by the door opposite to the
one they had come through, "is the dining-room. Which takes us back to
the hall and completes the circle."

This room, of a fine new Pompeian red, was lighted. The table was set; a
butler busied himself at the sideboard. Gerald's eye was caught by the
brightness of a china basket piled high with sumptuous fruit, and
similarly caught the next moment by the pattern of the curtains, in
which the same rampant red lion was innumerably repeated on a ground of
wide-meshed lace.

"Wouldn't it be a lovely house to give a party in?" she asked him.
"Isn't it exactly right to give a party in? There are two big spare
chambers upstairs at the back that would do, one for gentlemen, one for
ladies, to lay off their things in. No use; we shall have to give a
party."

Having returned upstairs, he was without any false delicacy shown her
bedroom and her friend's bedroom and their dressing-rooms, as well as
given a peep into the two spare rooms, as yet incompletely furnished,
that he might get an idea how beautiful these were going to be when
finally industry and good taste had been brought to bear on them.

* * * * *

At dinner, which Mrs. Hawthorne seemed to have a fixed preference for
calling supper, it was Gerald who did most of the talking. The ladies
abandoned the lead to him, and listened with flattering attention while
he called into use his not too sadly rusted social gifts. He related
what he knew about the Indian Prince whose monument at the far end of
the Cascine had roused their interest. He explained the Misericordia. He
asked if they had noticed the wonderful figures of babies over the
colonnade of the Foundling Hospital, and told them how the "infantile
asylum," as he rendered it, was managed. He tried to amuse them by the
episodes from which certain streets in Florence have derived their
names, Street of the Dead Woman, Street of the Dissatisfied, Burg of the
Blithe.

Whenever he stopped there was silence, which he hastened again to break.

"You talk like Leslie," suddenly remarked Mrs. Hawthorne.

But now came the hot biscuits and the syrup, borne in by the mystified
butler at the same time as the more conventional dessert prepared by the
cook.

Aurora smiled at the biscuits' beautiful brown and, having broken one to
test its lightness, nodded in self-approval.