with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.

"Who's the wonderful-looking foreigner?"

"He isn't a foreigner. At least not very much."

"He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know," said one of
the women. "One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that
preserves the Roman mould. Isn't he an Italian?"

"He's an American. I ran across him out in the desert country."

"Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?"

Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did
not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked
onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the
railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name is Banneker."

"I've been seeing him for months," remarked another of the company.
"He's always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He's a
mystery."

"He's a beauty," said Cressey's left-hand neighbor.

Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray,
and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful
unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was
a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion.
Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a