Mrs. Baldwin, remarking this, good-naturedly leant across the table and asked him if he had come to London for the Wagner cycle.

“No,” he answered, “I came for the Horse Show at Olympia.”

At this moment Count Sciarra, having finished his third cigarette, turned to his hostess and thanked her for having allowed him to meet the most beautiful women of London in the most beautiful house in London, and in the house of the most beautiful hostess in London.

“J’ai vu chez vous,” he said, “le lys argente et la rose blanche, mais vous etes la rose ecarlate, la rose d’amour dont le parfum vivra dans mon coeur comme un poison dore (and here he hummed in a sing-song):—­

‘Io son, cantava, Io son, dolce sirena’ Addio, dolce sirena.”

Then he suddenly and abruptly got up, kissed his hostess’s hand vehemently three times, and said he was very sorry, but he must hasten to keep a pressing engagement.  He then left the room.

Mrs. Bergmann got up and said, “Let us go upstairs.”  But the men had most of them to go, some to the House of Commons, others to fulfil various engagements.

The stranger thanked Mrs. Bergmann for her kind hospitality and left.  And the remaining guests, seeing that it was obvious that no further attraction was to be expected, now took their leave reluctantly and went, feeling that they had been cheated.

Angela Lockton stayed a moment.

“Who were you expecting, Louise, dear?” she asked.

“Only an old friend,” said Mrs. Bergmann, “whom you would all have been very glad to see.  Only as he doesn’t want anybody to know he’s in London, I couldn’t tell you all who he was.”

“But tell me now,” said Mrs. Lockton; “you know how discreet I am.”

“I promised not to, dearest Angela,” she answered; “and, by the way, what was the name of the man you brought with you?”

“Didn’t I tell you?  How stupid of me!” said Mrs. Lockton.  “It’s a very easy name to remember:  Shakespeare, William Shakespeare.”

FETE GALANTE

To Cecilia Fisher

“The King said that nobody had ever danced as I danced to-night,” said Columbine.  “He said it was more than dancing, it was magic.”

“It is true,” said Harlequin, “you never danced like that before.”

But Pierrot paid no heed to their remarks, and stared vacantly at the sky.  They were sitting on the deserted stage of the grass amphitheatre where they had been playing.  Behind them were the clumps of cypress trees which framed a vista of endless wooden garden and formed their drop scene.  They were sitting immediately beneath the wooden framework made of two upright beams and one horizontal, which formed the primitive proscenium, and from which little coloured lights had hung during the performance.  The King and Queen and their lords and ladies who had looked on at the living puppet show had all left the amphitheatre; they had put on their masks and their dominoes, and were now dancing on the lawns, whispering in the alleys and the avenues, or sitting in groups under the tall dark trees.  Some of them were in boats on the lake, and everywhere one went, from the dark boscages, came sounds of music, thin, tinkling tunes played on guitars by skilled hands, and the bird-like twittering and whistling of flageolets.