“Your father is very gay to-night,” said she, gazing at Charlie as though she read into the recesses of his soul and could see a martyrdom there, though in fact she could not penetrate any further than the boy’s eyeballs.

“I beg you to note,” Mr. Prohack remarked.  “That as the glasses have only been filled once, and three of them are at least a quarter full, only the equivalent of two and a half champagne glasses has actually been drunk by four people, which will not explain much gaiety.  If the old gentleman is gay, and he does not assert that he is not, the true reason lies in either the caviare or the pate de foie gras, or in his crystal conscience.  Have a drink, Charles?”

“Finish mine, my pet,” said Eve, holding forth her tumbler, and Charlie obeyed.

“A touching sight,” observed Mr. Prohack.  “Now as Charlie has managed to spare us a few minutes out of his thrilling existence, I want to have a few words with him in private about an affair of state.  There’s nothing that you oughtn’t to hear,” he addressed the company, “but a great deal that you probably wouldn’t understand—­and the last thing we desire is to humiliate you.  That’s so, isn’t it, Carlos?”

“It is,” Charles quickly agreed, without a sign of self-consciousness.

“Now then, hostess, can you lend us another room,—­boudoir, morning-room, smoking-room, card-room, even ball-room; anything will do for us.  Possibly Ozzie’s study....”

“Father!  Father!” Sissie warned him against an excess of facetiousness.  “You can either go into our bedroom or you can sit on the stairs, and talk.”

As father and son disappeared together into the bedroom, which constituted a full half of the entire flat, Mr. Prohack noticed on his wife’s features an expression of anxiety tempered by an assured confidence in his own wisdom and force.  He knew indeed that he had made quite a favourable sensation by his handling of Sissie’s tendency to a hard austerity.

Nevertheless, when Charles shut the door of the chamber and they were enclosed together, Mr. Prohack could feel his mighty heart beating in a manner worthy of a schoolgirl entering an examination room.  The chamber had apparently been taken bodily out of a doll’s house and furnished with furniture manufactured for pigmies.  It was very full, presenting the aspect of a room in a warehouse.  Everything in it was ‘bijou,’ in the trade sense, and everything harmonised in a charming Japanese manner with everything else, except an extra truckle-bed, showing crude iron feet under a blazing counterpane borrowed from a Russian ballet, which second bed had evidently just been added for the purposes of conjugal existence.  The dressing-table alone was unmistakably symptomatic of a woman.  Some of Ozzie’s wondrous trousers hung from stretchers behind the door, and the inference was that these had been displaced from the wardrobe in favour of Sissie’s frocks.  It was all highly curious and somewhat pathetic; and