"Attention!" she interrupted under her breath, and, stepping forward quickly, touched the bell.  “I have brought a frien’ of our dear, droll Cooley with me to tea.  Monsieur Mellin, you mus’ make acquaintance with Monsieur Sneyd.  He is English, but we shall forgive him because he is a such ole frien’ of mine.”

“Ah, yes,” said Mellin.  “Remember seeing you on the boat, running across the pond.”

“Yes, ev coss,” responded Mr. Sneyd cordially.  “I wawsn’t so fawchnit as to meet you, but dyuh eold Cooley’s talked ev you often.  Heop I sh’ll see maw of you hyuh.”

A very trim, very intelligent-looking maid opened the door, and the two men followed Madame de Vaurigard into a square hall, hung with tapestries and lit by two candles of a Brobdingnagian species Mellin had heretofore seen only in cathedrals.  Here Mr. Sneyd paused.

“I weon’t be bawthring you,” he said.  “Just a wad with you, Cantess, and I’m off.”

The intelligent-looking maid drew back some heavy curtains leading to a salon beyond the hall, and her mistress smiled brightly at Mellin.

“I shall keep him to jus’ his one word,” she said, as the young man passed between the curtains.

It was a nobly proportioned room that he entered, so large that, in spite of the amount of old furniture it contained, the first impression it gave was one of spaciousness.  Panels of carved and blackened wood lined the walls higher than his head; above them, Spanish leather gleamed here and there with flickerings of red and gilt, reflecting dimly a small but brisk wood fire which crackled in a carved stone fireplace.  His feet slipped on the floor of polished tiles and wandered from silky rugs to lose themselves in great black bear skins as in unmown sward.  He went from the portrait of a “cinquecento” cardinal to a splendid tryptich set over a Gothic chest, from a cabinet sheltering a collection of old glass to an Annunciation by an unknown Primitive.  He told himself that this was a “room in a book,” and became dreamily assured that he was a man in a book.  Finally he stumbled upon something almost grotesquely out of place:  a large, new, perfectly-appointed card-table with a sliding top, a smooth, thick, green cover and patent compartments.

He halted before this incongruity, regarding it with astonishment.  Then a light laugh rippled behind him, and he turned to find Madame de Vaurigard seated in a big red Venetian chair by the fire.

She wore a black lace dress, almost severe in fashion, which gracefully emphasized her slenderness; and she sat with her knees crossed, the firelight twinkling on the beads of her slipper, on her silken instep, and flashing again from the rings upon the slender fingers she had clasped about her knee.

She had lit a thin, long Russian cigarette.