They went through the conservatory to the octagon dining-room, where the supper was ready, a special supper, on a table by a window, a table laden with exotics and brilliant with glass and silver.  The supper was, of course, perfect in its way.  Mr. Smithson’s chef had been down to see about it, and Mr. Smithson’s own particular champagne and the claret grown in his own particular clos in the Gironde, had been sent down for the feast.  No common cuisine, no common wine could be good enough; and yet there was a day when the cheapest gargote in Belleville or Montmartre was good enough for Mr. Smithson.  There had been days on which he did not dine at all, and when the fumes of a gibelotte steaming from a workman’s restaurant made his mouth water.

The supper was all life and gaiety.  Everyone was hungry and thirsty, and freshioned by the drive, except Lesbia.  She was singularly silent, ate hardly anything, but drank three or four glasses of champagne.

Don Gomez was not a great talker.  He had the air of a prince of the blood royal, who expects other people to talk and to keep him amused, But the little he said was to the point.  He had a fine baritone, very low and subdued, and had a languor which was almost insolent, but not without its charm.  There was an air of originality about the manner and the man.

He was the typical rastaquouere, a man of finished manners, and unknown antecedents, a foreigner, apparently rich, obviously accomplished, but with that indefinable air which bespeaks the adventurer; and which gives society as fair a warning as if the man wore a placard on his shoulder with the word cave.

But to Lesbia this Spaniard was the first really interesting man she had met since she saw John Hammond; and her interest in him was much more vivid than her interest in Hammond had been at the beginning of their acquaintance.  That pale face, with its tint of old ivory, those thin, finely-cut lips, indicative of diabolical craft, could she but read aright, those unfathomable eyes, touched her fancy as it had never yet been touched, awoke within her that latent vein of romance, self-abnegation, supreme foolishness, which lurks in the nature of every woman, be she chaste as ice and pure as snow.

The supper was long.  It was past two o’clock, and the ballroom was thinly occupied, when Mr. Smithson’s party went there.

‘You won’t dance to-night, I suppose?’ said Smithson, as Lesbia and he went slowly down the room arm in arm.  It was in a pause between two waltzes.  The wide window at the end was opened to the summer night, and the room was delightfully cool.  ‘You must be horribly tired?’

’I am not in the least tired, and I mean to waltz, if anyone will ask me,’ replied Lesbia, decisively.

’I ought to have asked you to dance, and then it would have been the other way,’ said Smithson, with a touch of acrimony.  ’Surely you have dancing enough in town, and you might be obliging for once in a way, and come and sit with me in the garden, and listen to the nightingales.’