st
circumstances--to persuade her that two enormous porcelain jars owned by
a dealer of his acquaintance were the very thing needed in that
bare-looking ball-room of hers. There was a third reason. A lady whose
friendship had latterly--since the night of the _veglione_, in
fact--taken on the glow of roses and the warmth of wine, had taken it
into her charming head to be jealous, fantastically, of Mrs. Hawthorne.
Charlie, whose manly vanity his good fortune had, not unnaturally,
reinforced; Charlie, who if he were loved much must always love less
than the other, felt a certain stimulation in exhibitions of jealousy
with regard to himself. He thought well of the results of saying, "I
cannot come this evening, _cara_, I am dining at the Hawthorne's."
So he accepted Aurora's invitation.

The dinner was superlative, but it was written he should leave the house
finally in a bad humor. The feasted guest was a big Western American, of
the immensely rich and not very interesting type, whom he had seen once
or twice at the bank. Aurora's fond esteem for this man was open and
shameless. Whether he were a "has been," an "is," or a "to be," Charlie
could not determine, but only in the character of suitor could he see
him in the picture.

The dark face of Landini, his Chief, across the dinner table, when his
eyes sought it was indecipherable to him; but, shut as it was, he was
reminded by it, not to the improvement of his spirits, of a little
personal hope, a just and rational hope, which might have to be
relinquished. After dinner he got his hostess into a quiet corner for a
chat.

"Where's Gerald?" pure curiosity made him ask, with that impertinence
which his friends were accustomed to and took lightly, because curiosity
and impertinence were part and parcel of Charlie, and if you cared
sufficiently for his attractive smoothness and flashing smile to wish
them near you, you must put up with the bad breeding underlying his good
manners. "Where's Gerald?" he asked familiarly.

"Gerald isn't well enough yet to be out," Aurora answered him, with
imperfect candor. "You didn't know he'd been ill? Why, how funny! He's
been having what you call here a 'fluxion of the chest.'"

This ignorance of Charlie's comforted her by proving that the news of
her nursing Gerald had not spread over the town like wildfire, as she
had been warned it would. Florence was not so bad or nimble a gossip as
she had feared.

"I was as nice to Charlie Hunt