her brother-in-law; but men could not help looking at Olive.
Mr Marvel stood up and bowed as she passed, and the silent, saturnine
Marchese stared. His black eyes were intent upon her as she came to
the piano where Mamie was restlessly turning over the music, and no
one watching him could fail to see that he was making comparisons
that were probably to the disadvantage of his step-daughter.

Fast men are not necessarily fond of the patchouli atmosphere in their
own homes, and somehow Mamie seemed to reek of that scent, though in
fact she never used it. She was clever and fairly well educated, and
she had always been sheltered and cared for, but she was born to the
scarlet, and everything she said and did, her way of walking, the use
she made already of her black eyes, proclaimed it. To-night, though
she wore the red she loved--a wonderful, flaring frock of chiffon
frills and flounces--she looked ill, and her dark face was sullen.

"The beastly wind has given me a stiff neck," she complained. "Here, I
want to have this."

She chose a coon's lullaby out of the pile of songs, and Olive sat
down obediently and began the accompaniment. It was a pretty little
ditty of the usual moony order, and Mamie sang it well enough. Mr
Marvel looked up when it was over to say, "Thank you, my dear. Very
nice."

"It is a silly thing," Mamie answered ungraciously. "I'll sing you a
_canzonetta_ now."

She turned over the music, scattering marches and sonatas, and
throwing some of them on the floor in her impatience. Olive, wondering
at her temper, presently divined the cause of it. The folding doors
that led into the library were half closed. No lamps, but a flicker of
firelight and the hush of lowered voices, Edna's pleasant little pipe
and a man's brief, murmured answers, and there were short spaces of
silence too. The American girl and her prince were there.

The Marchese had raised his eyebrows at the first words of the
_canzonetta_, and at the end of the second verse he was smiling
broadly.

"Little devil!" he said.

No one heard him. His wife was showing her brother-in-law some of her
most treasured bits of china. She was quite calm, as though her
knowledge of Italian was fair the Neapolitan dialect was beyond her.
Mr Marvel, of course, knew not a syllable of any language but his own,
and the slang of Southern gutters was as Greek to Olive. Their
placidity amused the Marchese, and so did the thought of the little
scene that