“Who is your neighbor?”

“I don’t know,” she managed to whisper back.  “He’s so taken up with Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott that he hasn’t looked this way.  I don’t think he’s any member of the family.”

“He must be,” Wayne replied.  “I know his voice.  I have some association with it, but just what I can’t remember.”

Miriam herself listened to hear him speak, catching only an irrelevant word or two.

“He sounds English,” she said then.

“No, he isn’t English.  That’s not my association.  It’s curious how the mind acts.  Since I became—­since my sight failed—­my memory instinctively brings me voices instead of faces, when I want to recall anything.  Aren’t you going to speak to him?  You’ve got the formula:  Is this your bread or mine?”

“It’s very convenient, but I don’t think I shall use it.”

“He’d like you to, I know.  I heard him say to Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott as we came in—­while Queenie Jarrott was talking—­that you were he most strikingly beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.  How’s that for a compliment from a perfect stranger?”

“I certainly sha’n’t speak to him now.  A man who could say that to Mrs. Endsleigh, after having seen her, must be wofully wanting in tact.”

Mary Pole on Wayne’s right claimed his attention and Miriam was left her own mistress.  Almost at once her attention was arrested by hearing Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott saying in that appealing voice which she counted as the secret of her success with men: 

“Now do give me your frank opinion, Mr. Strange.  You don’t know how much I should like it.  It’s far from my idea that we should slavishly copy London.  You know that, don’t you?  We’ve an entirely different stock of materials to work with.  But I’m firmly convinced that by working on the London model we should make society far more general, far more representative, and far—­oh, far—­more interesting!  Now, what do you think?  Do give me your frank opinion.”

Mr. Strange!  Her own name was sufficiently uncommon to cause Miriam to glance sidewise, in her rapid, fugitive way, at the person who bore it.  His face was turned from her as he bent toward Mrs. Jarrott, but again she heard his voice, and this time more distinctly.

“I’m afraid my opinion wouldn’t be of much value.  Nevertheless, I know you must be right.”

“Now I’m disappointed in you,” Mrs. Jarrott said, with pretty reproachfulness.  “You’re not taking me seriously.  Oh, I see, I see.  You’re just an ordinary man, after all; when I thought for a minute you might be—­well, a little different.  Do take some of that asparagus,” she added in another tone.  “It’s simply delicious.”