The facetious Quinby did not confine his more or less caustic commentary to the well-known folk of whom there seemed no dearth; in the ten or twenty minutes that we sat together he further revealed himself as a copious gossip, with a wide net alike for the big fish and for the smallest fry.  There was a sheepish gentleman with a twitching face, and a shaven cleric in close attendance; the former a rich brand plucked from burning by the latter, whose temporal reward was the present trip, so Quinby assured me during the time it took them to pass before our eyes through the now emptying hall.  A delightfully boyish young American came inquiring waggishly for his “best girl”; next moment I was given to understand that he meant his bride, who was ten times too good for him, with further trivialities to which the dressing-bell put a timely period.  There was no sign of my Etonian when I went upstairs.

As I dressed in my small low room, with its sloping ceiling of varnished wood, at the top of the house, I felt that after all I had learnt nothing really new respecting that disturbing young gentleman.  Quinby had already proved himself such an arrant gossip as to discount every word that he had said before I placed him in his proper type:  it is one which I have encountered elsewhere, that of the middle-aged bachelor who will and must talk, and he had confessed his celibacy almost in his first breath; but a more pronounced specimen of the type I am in no hurry to meet again.  If, however, there was some comfort in the thought of his more than probable exaggerations, there was none at all in the knowledge that these would be, if they had not already been, poured into every tolerant ear in the place, if anything more freely than into mine.

I was somewhat late for dinner, but the scandalous couple were later still, and all the evening I saw nothing of them.  That, however, was greatly due to this fellow Quinby, whose determined offices one could hardly disdain after once accepting favours from him.  In the press after dinner I saw his ferret’s face peering this way and that, a good head higher than any other, and the moment our eyes met he began elbowing his way toward me.  Only an ingrate would have turned and fled; and for the next hour or two I suffered Quinby to exploit my wounds and me for a good deal more than our intrinsic value.  To do the man justice, however, I had no fault to find with the very pleasant little circle into which he insisted on ushering me, at one end of the glazed veranda, and should have enjoyed my evening but for an inquisitive anxiety to get in touch with the unsuspecting pair.  Meanwhile the lilt of a waltz had mingled with the click of billiard balls and the talking and laughing which make a summer’s night vocal in that outpost of pleasure on the silent heights; and some of our party had gone off to dance.  In the end I followed them, sticks and all; but there was no Bob Evers among the dancers, nor in the billiard-room, nor anywhere else indoors.