“Oh—­cut him out.”  The Boy seemed thoughtful.  “Though you aren’t in love with her?”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“Will you go if I do—­that is, if she really asks us?”

I expected him to flash out a refusal, but he brooded under a deep shadow of eyelashes for a while, looking half cross, half mischievous, and finally said:  “I’ll think it over.”

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XVI

A Man from the Dark

“Desperate, proud, fond, sick, . . . rejected by men.” 
—­WALT WHITMAN.

As we drank our cafe double, tap, tap, came at the door; a message from the Contessa di Ravello asking if we would not take coffee with her and her friends in their private sitting-room.

I would have preferred to finish my talk with the Little Pal, which had reached an entertaining point in the announcement that he seemed to know me less well since he had heard my name—­that names, and past histories, and circumstances were barriers between lives.  But the Boy, reluctant a short time ago to be drawn into the Contessa’s society, was now apparently willing to give up the tete-a-tete.

We left our coffee, and went to drink the Contessa’s, which reached our lips chilled by the silent enmity of her friends.  But, whether because their example had been a warning, or because he had suffered a “change, into something new and strange,” the Boy was no longer a wet blanket.  He did not show the self which I had learned to know in some of its phases, but he was shyly conciliatory with the Contessa, the blue eyes hinting that, if she were persistent, his admiration might be won.  Still, he often answered in monosyllables or briefly, when she spoke to him, a smile curving his short upper lip.  I could not understand what his manner meant, nor, I am sure, could she; but she was evidently bent on solving the puzzle.

“Do you play tennis?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“Ah, so do I, and well, too, though I’m not English.  Lord Lane will tell you that.  And you dance, I know.”

“Yes.”

“You love it?  I do.”

“I used to.”

“That sounds as if you were a hundred, instead of—­nineteen, is it not?”

“I’m not quite ninety-nine.”

“I should like to dance with you.  We are the right size for each other in the dance, are we not?”

“I’d try not to disappoint you.”

“Oh, we must have a dance.  You love music, I know.  One sees it by your eyes.  Once, when I asked Lord Lane if he sang or played, he said that he ‘had no drawing-room tricks.’  Rude of him, n’est-ce pas?  But you?  Is it that you play?”

“The violin will talk for me, if I coax it.”

“Ah, I was sure.  We are going to be congenial.  But the singing?  I see by your face that you sing, though you won’t say so.  Here is a piano.  I will accompany you, if you like, and if we know the same things.  Perhaps our voices would be well together.”