Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/179

 à deux? A roommate? Matrimony? Here was the intrusion of another piece on the board—a piece new and unexpected. Would it turn out to be an added interest for himself, or a plain source of disconcertment?

Cope, having unconsciously set the ball rolling, gave it further impetus. He sketched his absent friend and told of their plans for the winter and spring terms. "I shall try for a large easy chair," he concluded, "unless Arthur can be induced to bring one with him."

Randolph, by this time, had led Cope into the den, established him between padded arms, and given him a cigar. He drew Cope's attention to the jades and swordguards, to the odd assortment of primitive musical instruments (which would doubtless, in time, find a place at the Art Museum in the city), and to his latest acquisition—a volume of Bembo's "Le Prose." It had reached him but a week before from Venice,—"in Venetia al segno del Pozzo, ," said the titlepage, in fact. It was bound in vellum, pierced by bookworms, and was decorated, in quaint seventeenthcentury penmanship, with marginal annotations, and also, on the fly leaves, wth repeated honorifics due to a study of the forms of address by some young aspirant for favor. Randolph had rather depended on it to take Cope's interest; but now the little envoi from the Lagoons seemed lesser in its lustre. Cope indeed took the volume with docility and looked at its classical title-page and at its quaint Biblical colophon; but, "Just who was 'Pietro Bembo'?" he asked; and Randolph realized, with a slight shock, that young