The others at the table were suddenly silent, and seemed to be listening.  Lady Maud’s clear eyes rested on Mr. Feist’s face.

‘He’s quite a wonderful man, I think,’ observed the latter.

‘Yes,’ assented the Primadonna indifferently.

‘Don’t you think he is a wonderful man?’ insisted Mr. Feist, with his disagreeable drawl.

‘I daresay he is,’ Margaret answered, ’but I don’t know him very well.’

‘Really?  That’s funny!’

‘Why?’

’Because I happen to know that he thinks everything of you, Madame Cordova.  That’s why I supposed, you were intimate friends.’

The others had listened hitherto in a sort of mournful silence, distinctly bored.  Lady Maud’s eyes now turned to Margaret, but the latter still seemed perfectly indifferent, though she was wishing that some one else would speak.  Griggs turned to Mr. Feist, who was next to him.

‘You mean that he is a wonderful man of business, perhaps,’ he said.

‘Well, we all know he’s that, anyway,’ returned his neighbour.  ’He’s not exactly a friend of mine, not exactly!’ A meaning smile wrinkled the unhealthy face and suddenly made it look older.  ’All the same, I think he’s quite wonderful.  He’s not merely an able man, he’s a man of powerful intellect.’

‘A Nickel Napoleon,’ suggested the barrister, who was bored to death by this time, and could not imagine why Lady Maud followed the conversation with so much interest.

‘Your speaking of nickel,’ said the peer, at her elbow, ’reminds me of that extraordinary new discovery—­let me see—­what is it?’

‘America?’ suggested the barrister viciously.

‘No,’ said his lordship, with perfect gravity, ’it’s not that.  Ah yes, I remember!  It’s a process for making nitric acid out of air.’

Lady Maud nodded and smiled, as if she knew all about it, but her eyes were again scrutinising Mr. Feist’s face.  Her neighbour, whose hobby was applied science, at once launched upon a long account of the invention.  From time to time the beauty nodded and said that she quite understood, which was totally untrue, but well meant.

‘That young man has the head of a criminal,’ said the barrister on her other side, speaking very low.

She bent her head very slightly, to show that she had heard, and she continued to listen to the description of the new process.  By this time every one was talking again.  Mr. Feist was in conversation with Griggs, and showed his profile to the barrister, who quietly studied the retreating forehead and the ill-formed jaw, the latter plainly discernible to a practised eye, in spite of the round cheeks.  The barrister was a little mad on the subject of degeneracy, and knew that an unnaturally boyish look in a grown man is one of the signs of it.  In the course of a long experience at the bar he had appeared in defence of several ‘high-class criminals.’  By way of comparing Mr. Feist with a perfectly healthy specimen of humanity, he turned to look at Logotheti beside him.  Margaret was talking with the Ambassador, and the Greek was just turning to talk to his neighbour, so that their eyes met, and each waited for the other to speak first.