“We shall see!” said Roderick, with an excited laugh.

“Certainly we shall see.  But I retire from the discussion,” the Cavaliere added.  “I have no wish to provoke you to attempt to prove to me that I am wrong.  You are already excited.”

“No more than is natural to a man who in an hour or so is to dance the cotillon with Miss Light.”

“The cotillon? has she promised?”

Roderick patted the air with a grand confidence.  “You ’ll see!” His gesture might almost have been taken to mean that the state of his relations with Miss Light was such that they quite dispensed with vain formalities.

The Cavaliere gave an exaggerated shrug.  “You make a great many mourners!”

“He has made one already!” Rowland murmured to himself.  This was evidently not the first time that reference had been made between Roderick and the Cavaliere to the young man’s possible passion, and Roderick had failed to consider it the simplest and most natural course to say in three words to the vigilant little gentleman that there was no cause for alarm—­his affections were preoccupied.  Rowland hoped, silently, with some dryness, that his motives were of a finer kind than they seemed to be.  He turned away; it was irritating to look at Roderick’s radiant, unscrupulous eagerness.  The tide was setting toward the supper-room and he drifted with it to the door.  The crowd at this point was dense, and he was obliged to wait for some minutes before he could advance.  At last he felt his neighbors dividing behind him, and turning he saw Christina pressing her way forward alone.  She was looking at no one, and, save for the fact of her being alone, you would not have supposed she was in her mother’s house.  As she recognized Rowland she beckoned to him, took his arm, and motioned him to lead her into the supper-room.  She said nothing until he had forced a passage and they stood somewhat isolated.

“Take me into the most out-of-the-way corner you can find,” she then said, “and then go and get me a piece of bread.”

“Nothing more?  There seems to be everything conceivable.”

“A simple roll.  Nothing more, on your peril.  Only bring something for yourself.”

It seemed to Rowland that the embrasure of a window (embrasures in Roman palaces are deep) was a retreat sufficiently obscure for Miss Light to execute whatever design she might have contrived against his equanimity.  A roll, after he had found her a seat, was easily procured.  As he presented it, he remarked that, frankly speaking, he was at loss to understand why she should have selected for the honor of a tete-a-tete an individual for whom she had so little taste.

“Ah yes, I dislike you,” said Christina.  “To tell the truth, I had forgotten it.  There are so many people here whom I dislike more, that when I espied you just now, you seemed like an intimate friend.  But I have not come into this corner to talk nonsense,” she went on.  “You must not think I always do, eh?”