“When I shall know I shall perhaps find it all interesting,” she continued to the Duke.

“Between us we shall have to instruct you thoroughly, eh, Tristram, my boy?  And then you must be a great leader, and have a salon, as the ladies of the eighteenth century did:  we want a beautiful young woman to draw us all together.”

“Well, don’t you think I have found you a perfect specimen, Uncle!” Tristram exclaimed; and he raised his glass and kissed the brim, while he whispered: 

“Darling, my sweet lady—­I drink to your health.”

But this was too much for Zara—­he was overdoing the part—­and she turned and flashed upon him a glance of resentment and contempt.

Beyond the Duke sat Jimmy Danvers, and then Emily Guiscard and Lord Coltshurst, and the two young people exchanged confidences in a low voice.

“I say, Emily, isn’t she a corker?” Sir James said.  “She don’t look a bit English, though, she reminds me of a—­oh, well, I’m not good at history or dates, but some one in the old Florentine time.  She looks as if she could put a dagger into one or give a fellow a cup of poison, without turning a hair.”

“Oh, Jimmy! how horrid,” exclaimed Emily.  “She does not seem to me to have a cruel face, she only looks peculiar and mysterious, and—­and—­unsmiling.  Do you think she loves Tristram?  Perhaps that is the foreign way—­to appear so cold.”

At that moment Sir James Danvers caught the glance which Zara gave her fiance for his toast.

“Je-hoshaphat!” he exclaimed!  But he realized that Emily had not seen, so he stopped abruptly.

“Yes—­one can never be sure of things with foreigners,” he said, and he looked down at his plate.  That poor devil of a Tristram was going to have a thorny time in the future, he thought, and he was to be best man at the wedding; it would be like giving the old chap over to a tigress!  But, by Jove!—­such a beautiful one would be worth being eaten by—­he added to himself.

And during one of Francis Markrute’s turnings to his left-hand neighbor Lord Coltshurst said to Lady Ethelrida: 

“I think Tristram’s choice peculiarly felicitous, Ethelrida, do not you?  But I fear her ladyship”—­and he glanced timidly at his wife—­“will not take this view.  She has a most unreasonable dislike for young women with red hair.  ‘Ungovernable temperaments,’ she affirms.  I trust she won’t prejudice your Aunt Jane.”

“Aunt Jane always thinks for herself,” said Lady Ethelrida.  She announced no personal opinion about Tristram’s fiance, nor could Lord Coltshurst extort one from her.

As the dinner went on she felt a growing sense that they were all on the edge of a volcano.

Lady Ethelrida never meddled in other people’s affairs, but she loved Tristram as a brother and she felt a little afraid.  She could not see his face, from where she sat—­the table was a long one with oval ends—­but she, too, had seen the flash from Zara which had caused Jimmy Danvers to exclaim:  “Jehoshaphat!”