Beratinsky had to come along to the entrance-hall to enter the names of his visitors in a book.  He was a little man, somewhat corpulent, with bushy black eyebrows, intensely black eyes, and black closely-cropped beard.  The head was rather handsome; the figure not.

“Ah, Calabressa, you have come alive again!” he said, speaking in pretty fair Italian.  “We heard you were in London.  What is it?”

The last phrase was uttered in a low voice, though there was no by-stander.  But Calabressa, with a lofty gesture, replied,

“My friend, we are not always on commissions.  Sometimes we have a little liberty—­a little money—­a notion in our head.  And if one cannot exactly travel en prince, n’importe! we have our little excursion.  And if one has one’s sweetheart to see?  Do you know, friend Beratinsky, that I have been dining with Natalie—­the little Natalushka, as, she used to be called?”

Beratinsky glanced quickly at him with the black, piercing eyes.

“Ah, the beautiful child! the beautiful child!” Calabressa exclaimed, as if he was addressing some one not present.  “The mouth sweet, pathetic, like that in Titian’s Assumption:  you have seen the picture in the Venice Academy?  But she is darker than Titian’s Virgin; she is of the black, handsome Magyar breed, like her mother.  You never saw her mother, Beratinsky?”

“No,” said the other, rather surlily.  “Come, sit down and have a cigar.”

“A cigarette—­a cigarette and a little cognac, if you please,” said Calabressa, when the three companions had gone along to the middle of the hall and taken their seats.  “Ah, it was such a surprise to me:  the sight of her grown to be a woman, and the perfect, beautiful image of her mother—­the very voice too—­I could have thought it was a dream.”

“Did you come here to talk of nothing but Lind’s daughter?” said Beratinsky, with scant courtesy.

“Precisely,” remarked Calabressa, in absolute good-humor.  “But before that a word.”

He glanced round this assemblage of foreign-looking persons, no doubt guessing at the various nationalities indicated by physique and complexion—­Prussian, Pole, Rhinelander, Swiss, and what not.  If the company, in English eyes, might have looked Bohemian—­that is to say, unconventional in manner and costume—­the Bohemianism, at all events, was of a well-to-do, cheerful, good-humored character.  There was a good deal of talking besides the music.

“These gentlemen,” said Calabressa, in a low voice, “are they friends—­are they with us?”

“Only one or two,” said Beratinsky.

“You do not come here to proselytize, then?”

“One must amuse one’s self sometimes,” said the little, fat, black-haired Pole, somewhat gruffly.

“Then one must take care what one says!”

“I presume that is generally the case, friend Calabressa.”

But Calabressa was not offended.  He was interested in what was going on.