Hartley caught Baron de Vries’ eye, and looked away again hastily.

“My—­ah, Phidias,” said he, resisting an irritable desire to correct the lady, “got mislaid to-day.  It sha’n’t happen again, I promise you.  He’s a very busy person just now, though.  He hasn’t time for social dissipation.  I’m the butterfly of the pair.”

The lady gave a sudden laugh.

“He was busy enough the last time I saw him,” she said, crinkling her eyelids.  She turned to Miss Benham.  “Do you remember that evening we were going home from the Madrid and motored round by Montmartre to see the fete?”

“Yes,” said Miss Benham, unsmiling, “I remember.”

“Your friend Ste. Marie,” said the American lady to Hartley, “was distinctly the lion of the fete—­at the moment we arrived, anyhow.  He was riding a galloping pig and throwing those paper streamer things—­what do you call them?—­with both hands, and a genial lady in a blue hat was riding the same pig and helping him out.  It was just like the Vie de Boheme and the other books.  I found it charming.”

Baron de Vries emitted an amused chuckle.

“That was very like Ste. Marie,” he said.  “Ste. Marie is a very exceptional young man.  He can be an angel one moment, a child playing with toys the next, and—­well, a rather commonplace social favorite the third.  It all comes of being romantic—­imaginative.  Ste. Marie—­I know nothing about this evening of which you speak, but Ste. Marie is quite capable of stopping on his way to a funeral to ride a galloping pig—­or on his way to his own wedding.  And the pleasant part of it is,” said Baron de Vries, “that the lad would turn up at either of these two ceremonies not a bit the worse, outside or in, for his ride.”

“Ah, now, that’s an oddly close shot,” said Hartley.  He paused a moment, looking toward Miss Benham, and said:  “I beg pardon!  Were you going to speak?”

“No,” said Miss Benham, moving the things about on the tea-table before her, and looking down at them.  “No, not at all!”

“You came oddly close to the truth,” the man went on, turning back to Baron de Vries.

He was speaking for Helen Benham’s ears, and he knew she would understand that, but he did not wish to seem to be watching her.

“I was with Ste. Marie on that evening,” he said.  “No, I wasn’t riding a pig, but I was standing down in the crowd throwing serpentines at the people who were.  And I happen to know that he—­that Ste. Marie was on that day, that evening, more deeply concerned about something, more absolutely wrapped up in it, devoted to it, than I have ever known him to be about anything since I first knew him.  The galloping pig was an incident that made, except for the moment, no impression whatever upon him.”  Hartley nodded his head.  “Yes,” said he, “Ste. Marie can be an angel one moment and a child playing with toys the next.  When he sees toys he always plays with them, and he plays hard, but when he drops them they go completely out of his mind.”