"It rained in torrents," said the telegram, "at the dowager duchess's garden party. You know what that means."
It was signed "John Thacker."
"Isn't that a devil of a night-cap?" muttered Minot gloomily.
CHAPTER X
TWO BIRDS OF PASSAGE
On the same busy night when the Lileth flashed her red signal and Miss Gabrielle Rose arrived with a package of letters that screamed for a Cotrell, two strangers invaded San Marco by means of the eight-nineteen freight south. Frayed, fatigued and famished as they were, it would hardly have been kind to study them as they strolled up San Sebastian Avenue toward the plaza. But had you been so unkind, you would never have guessed that frequently, in various corners of the little round globe, they had known prosperity, the weekly pay envelope, and the buyer's crook of the finger summoning a waiter.
One of the strangers was short, with flaming red hair and in his eye the twinkle without which the collected works of Bernard Shaw are as sounding brass. He twinkled about him as he walked—at the bright lights and spurious gaiety under the spell of which San Marco sought to forget the rates per day with bath.
"The French," he mused, "are a volatile people, fond of light wines and dancing. So, it would seem, are the inhabitants of San Marco. White flannels, Harry, white flannels. They should encase that leaning tower of Pisa you call your manly form."
The other—long, cadaverous, immersed in a gentle melancholy—groaned.
"Another tourist hothouse! Packed with innocents abroad, and everybody bleeding 'em but us. Everything here but a real home, with chintz table-covers and a cold roast of beef in the ice-chest. What are we doing here? We should have gone north."