“You will forgive, dear friend,” wrote Madame de Vaurigard, “if I ask you that we renounce our drive to-day.  You see, I wish to have that little dinner to-night and must make preparation.  Honorable Chandler Pedlow arrived this morning from Paris and that droll Mr. Cooley I have learn is coincidentally arrived also.  You see I think it would be very pleasant to have the dinner to welcome these friends on their arrival.  You will come surely—­or I shall be so truly miserable.  You know it perhaps too well!  We shall have a happy evening if you come to console us for renouncing our drive.  A thousand of my prettiest wishes for you.

     “Helene.”

The signature alone consoled him.  To have that note from her, to own it, was like having one of her gloves or her fan.  He would keep it forever, he thought; indeed, he more than half expressed a sentiment to that effect in the response which he wrote in the aquarium, while Sneyd waited for him at a table near by.  The Englishman drew certain conclusions in regard to this reply, since it permitted a waiting friend to consume three long tumblers of brandy-and-soda before it was finished.  However, Mr. Sneyd kept his reflections to himself, and, when the epistle had been dispatched by a messenger, took the American’s arm and led him to the “American Bar” of the hotel, a region hitherto unexplored by Mellin.

Leaning against the bar were Cooley and the man whom Mellin had seen lolling beside Madame de Vaurigard in Cooley’s automobile in Paris, the same gross person for whom he had instantly conceived a strong repugnance, a feeling not at once altered by a closer view.

Cooley greeted Mellin uproariously and Mr. Sneyd introduced the fat man.  “Mr. Mellin, the Honorable Chandler Pedlow,” he said; nor was the shock to the first-named gentleman lessened by young Cooley’s adding, “Best feller in the world!”

Mr. Pedlow’s eyes were sheltered so deeply beneath florid rolls of flesh that all one saw of them was an inscrutable gleam of blue; but, small though they were, they were not shifty, for they met Mellin’s with a squareness that was almost brutal.  He offered a fat paw, wet by a full glass which he set down too suddenly on the bar.

“Shake,” he said, in a loud and husky voice, “and be friends!  Tommy,” he added to the attendant, “another round of Martinis.”

“Not for me,” said Mellin hastily.  “I don’t often—­”

“What!” Mr. Pedlow roared suddenly.  “Why, the first words Countess de Vaurigard says to me this afternoon was, ’I want you to meet my young friend Mellin,’ she says; ’the gamest little Indian that ever come down the pike!  He’s game,’ she says—­’he’ll see you all under the table!’ That’s what the smartest little woman in the world, the Countess de Vaurigard, says about you.”

This did not seem very closely to echo Madame de Vaurigard’s habit of phrasing, but Mellin perceived that it might be only the fat man’s way of putting things.