Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/424

 knowledge of the language, conversation in a small group is rather—Five o'clock, did you say, Miss Allen?"

"Yes, five," she answered. She went on, with a manner suddenly gay, "Perceive the difference in human fate. At five you will be taking tea with personages, and I shall be scurrying to take a belated music lesson."

"Why at that hour?" inquired Livingstone.

"I've put it off to help Eugenia get settled here. For she's coming over, bag and baggage, Joséphine and Mlle. Tollet, to live with us for a while. Isn't that jolly?"

Livingstone was visibly affected. He flushed a little, and cleared his throat before he asked with a careful reassumption of his usual airy manner, "Might I perhaps, if it is not indiscreet to ask, be permitted to breathe out upon the air a request to be informed what possible reason any one can have for leaving the golden bath-tubs (if I may so express myself) of the Grand Hotel, and sojourning at the respectable but hardly luxurious Pensione Oldham?"

"That's what I asked her last night when she told me. But it seems she's just tired of gilded bath-tubs (if I may borrow the expression) and wants a change."

"I might say without exaggeration that she would be reasonably sure of getting it," surmised Livingstone, looking around him.

Neale could think of nothing to add to the conversation. You never could get a word in edgeways when Livingstone was in the room, anyhow. His mind was full of something else too. "A music lesson at five." The name Visconti was as apt to be in the directory as Pierleoni had been.

At five he saw her go into the little gate in the wall from which during the next hour he did not take his eyes. He stood in the doorway of an apartment house across the street, and when the portiere came out responsibly to ask whom he wished to see, Neale told him in English, seriously with a long breath, "The girl I've lost my head over." As he accompanied this unintelligible information with a large tip, as his clothes were respectable, as he was evidently a foreigner, and had