assisted. As the courses succeeded each other, under the exaltation of
wine, conversation became more general as regarded participation, but
more local and private as regarded the subject, until Miss Nevil could
no longer follow it. The interests of that one, the hopes of another,
the claims of a third, in affairs that were otherwise uninteresting,
were all discussed with singular youthfulness of trust that to her
alone seemed remarkable. Not that she lacked entertainment from the
conversation of her clever companion, whose confidences and criticisms
were very pleasant to her; but she had a gentlewoman's instinct that he
talked to her too much, and more than was consistent with his duties
as the general host. She looked around the table for her singular
acquaintance of an hour before, but she had not seen him since. She
would have spoken about him to Somers, but she had an instinctive
idea that the latter would be antipathetic, in spite of the stranger's
flattering commendation. So she found herself again following Somers's
cynical but good-humored description of the various guests, and, I
fear, seeing with his eyes, listening with his ears, and occasionally
participating in his superior attitude. The "fearful joy" she had found
in the novelty of the situation and the originality of the actors seemed
now quite right from this critical point of view. So she learned how the
guest with the long hair was an unknown painter, to whom Rushbrook had
given a commission for three hundred yards of painted canvas, to be cut
up and framed as occasion and space required, in Rushbrook's new
hotel in San Francisco; how the gray-bearded foreigner near him was an
accomplished bibliophile who was furnishing Mr. Rushbrook's library from
spoils of foreign collections, and had suffered unheard-of agonies from
the millionaire's insisting upon a handsome uniform binding that should
deprive certain precious but musty tomes of their crumbling, worm-eaten
coverings; how the very gentle, clerical-looking stranger, mildest of a
noisy, disputing crowd at the other table, was a notorious duelist and