or a bite!' Don Filippo called,
in the voice of a street-hawker. Elena and the Marchesa burst out
laughing.

'Why yes, of course, Filippo, you cried the wares,' said Donna
Francesca. 'Now what a pity you were not there, _cugino mio_! For five
louis you might have eaten fruit out of which I had had the first bite,
and have drunk champagne out of the hollow of Elena's hands for five
more.'

'How scandalous!' broke in the Baroness d'Isola, with a horrified
grimace.

'Ah, Mary, I like that! And did you not sell cigarettes that you lighted
up first yourself for a louis?' cried Francesca through her laughter.
Then she became suddenly grave. 'Every deed, with a charitable object in
view, is sacred,' she observed sententiously. 'By merely biting into
fruit, I collected at least two hundred louis.'

'And you?' Andrea Sperelli turned to Elena with as constrained
smile--'With your human drinking-cup--how much did you get?'

'I?--oh, two hundred and seventy louis.'

Everybody was full of fun and laughter, excepting the Marchese
d'Ateleta, who was old, and afflicted with incurable deafness; was
padded and painted--in a word, artificial from head to foot. He was very
like one of the figures one sees at a wax work show. From time to
time--usually the wrong one--he would give vent to a little dry cackling
laugh, like the rattle of some rusty mechanism inside him.

'However,' Elena resumed, 'you must know, that after a certain point in
the evening, the price rose to ten louis, and at last, that lunatic of a
Galeazzo Secinaro came and offered me a five hundred lire note, if I
would dry my hands on his great golden beard!'

As was ever the case at the d'Ateletas', the dinner increased in
splendour towards the end; for the true luxury of the table is shown in
the dessert. A multitude of choice and exquisite things, delighting the
eye no less than the palate, were disposed with consummate art in
various crystal and silver-mounted dishes. Festoons of camellias and
violets hung between the vine-wreathed eighteenth century candelabras,
round which sported fairies and nymphs, and on the wall-hangings more
fairies and nymphs, and all the charming figures of the pastoral
mythology--the Corydons, the Phylises, the Rosalinds--animated with
their sylvan loves one of those sunny Cytherean landscapes originated by
the fanciful imagination of Antoine Watteau.

The slightly erotic excitement, which is apt to take hold upon the
spirits at the