‘Ah, dear, dear!’ sighed Fenellan; ’and out of good comes evil!—­as grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his dripping wife from the mud of the Deluge waters.  Do you mean to be running and Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?’

‘Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!’ Dartrey said.

His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the sight of the women who knew him.

The bill-broker’s fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity concerning him to Nataly.  He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a soldier:  and was he married?  Yes, he was married.

Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor’s tone.  She could account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets.  She was young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man, fretful for a dash of imprudence.  This Mrs. Radnor should be the one to second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed of any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath—­she required it, for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip:  proved such, without a day’s variation during the whole of the ten wedded months.  Nataly gratified her spoken wish.  Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady, and she withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies had the wish ungratified.  Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and their complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced officer so well.

Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the multitude.  It circulated, one knows not how.  Eloquent as the whiffs to the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the field.  Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he was among the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a lawyer should do.  The Concert was complimentarily a topic:  Durandarte divine!—­did not everybody think so?  Everybody did, in default of a term for overtopping it.  Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices are stronger.  Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the ineffable.  Where was Durandarte now?  Gone; already gone; off with the Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear friend Mr. Radnor.  Cheque fifty guineas:  hardly more on both sides than an exchange of smiles.  Ah, these merchant-princes!  What of Mr. Radnor’s amateur instrumentalists?  Amateurs, they are not to be named:  perfect musicians.  Mr. Radnor is the perfection of a host.  Yes, yes; Mrs. Radnor; Miss Radnor too:  delicious voices; but what is it about Mr. Radnor so captivating!  He is not quite English, yet he is not at all foreign.  Is he very adventurous in business, as they say?