‘He is a musician,’ whispered Mademoiselle Adele to her stout friend.

‘Ah!’ replied Monsieur Anatole.  ’I am afraid I have eaten too many truffles.’

Mademoiselle Adele whispered in his ear some words of good counsel, upon which he laughed and looked very affectionate.

However, she could not relinquish her hold of the interesting foreigner.  After she had coaxed him to drink several glasses of champagne, he became livelier, and talked more.

‘Ah!’ cried she suddenly; ’I hear it in your speech.  You are an Englishman!’

The stranger grew quite red in the face, and answered quickly, ’No, madame.’

Mademoiselle Adele laughed.  ’I beg your pardon.  I know that Americans feel angry when they are taken for Englishmen.’

‘Neither am I an American,’ replied the stranger.

This was too much for Mademoiselle Adele.  She bent over her plate and looked sulky, for she saw that Mademoiselle Louison opposite was enjoying her defeat.

The foreign gentleman understood the situation, and added, half aloud:  ‘I am an Irishman, madame.’

‘Ah!’ said Mademoiselle Adele, with a grateful smile, for she was easily reconciled.

‘Anatole!  Irishman—­what is that?’ she asked in a whisper.

‘The poor of England,’ he whispered back.

‘Indeed!’

Adele elevated her eyebrows, and cast a shrinking, timid glance at the stranger.  She had suddenly lost much of her interest in him.

De Silvis’s dinners were excellent.  The party had sat long at table, and when Monsieur Anatole thought of the oysters with which the feast had begun, they appeared to him like a beautiful dream.  On the contrary, he had a somewhat too lively recollection of the truffles.

Dinner was over; hands were reaching out for glasses, or trifling with fruit or biscuits.

That sentimental blonde, Mademoiselle Louison, fell into meditation over a grape that she had dropped in her champagne glass.  Tiny bright air-bubbles gathered all round the coating of the fruit, and when it was quite covered with these shining white pearls, they lifted the heavy grape up through the wine to the surface.

‘Look!’ said Mademoiselle Louison, turning her large, swimming eyes upon the journalist, ‘look, white angels are bearing a sinner to heaven!’

‘Ah! charmant, mademoiselle!  What a sublime thought!’ exclaimed the journalist, enraptured.

Mademoiselle Louison’s sublime thought passed round the table, and was much admired.  Only the frivolous Adele whispered to her obese admirer, ‘It would take a good many angels to bear you, Anatole.’

Meanwhile the journalist seized the opportunity; he knew how to rivet the general attention.  Besides, he was glad to escape from a tiresome political controversy with the German; and, as he wore a red ribbon and affected the superior journalistic tone, everybody listened to him.