a sweet biscuit, please.  Really, why did n’t you ask me?  Do you have these things often?  Madame Grandoni, it ’s very unkind!” And the young girl, who had delivered herself of the foregoing succession of sentences in her usual low, cool, penetrating voice, uttered these last words with a certain tremor of feeling.  “I see,” she went on, “I do very well for balls and great banquets, but when people wish to have a cosy, friendly, comfortable evening, they leave me out, with the big flower-pots and the gilt candlesticks.”

“I ’m sure you ’re welcome to stay, my dear,” said Madame Grandoni, “and at the risk of displeasing you I must confess that if I did n’t invite you, it was because you ’re too grand.  Your dress will do very well, with its fifty flounces, and there is no need of your going into a corner.  Indeed, since you ’re here, I propose to have the glory of it.  You must remain where my people can see you.”

“They are evidently determined to do that by the way they stare.  Do they think I intend to dance a tarantella?  Who are they all; do I know them?” And lingering in the middle of the room, with her arm passed into Madame Grandoni’s, she let her eyes wander slowly from group to group.  They were of course observing her.  Standing in the little circle of lamplight, with the hood of an Eastern burnous, shot with silver threads, falling back from her beautiful head, one hand gathering together its voluminous, shimmering folds, and the other playing with the silken top-knot on the uplifted head of her poodle, she was a figure of radiant picturesqueness.  She seemed to be a sort of extemporized tableau vivant.  Rowland’s position made it becoming for him to speak to her without delay.  As she looked at him he saw that, judging by the light of her beautiful eyes, she was in a humor of which she had not yet treated him to a specimen.  In a simpler person he would have called it exquisite kindness; but in this young lady’s deportment the flower was one thing and the perfume another.  “Tell me about these people,” she said to him.  “I had no idea there were so many people in Rome I had not seen.  What are they all talking about?  It ’s all beyond me, I suppose.  There is Miss Blanchard, sitting as usual in profile against a dark object.  She is like a head on a postage-stamp.  And there is that nice little old lady in black, Mrs. Hudson.  What a dear little woman for a mother!  Comme elle est proprette!  And the other, the fiancee, of course she ’s here.  Ah, I see!” She paused; she was looking intently at Miss Garland.  Rowland measured the intentness of her glance, and suddenly acquired a firm conviction.  “I should like so much to know her!” she said, turning to Madame Grandoni.  “She has a charming face; I am sure she ’s an angel.  I wish very much you would introduce me.  No, on second thoughts, I had rather you did n’t.  I will speak to her bravely myself, as a friend of her cousin.”  Madame Grandoni and Rowland exchanged glances of baffled