"At eight-thirty the two missing guests arrived, Sir John sun-baked to the color of a coolie, and Lady Catnall not much better off so far as complexion was concerned. The climate had evidently done its work. Their queerly cut clothes, too, showed how long they had been out of London.
"With their announcement by the flunkey, who bawled out their names so indistinctly that nobody caught them—not even Lady Arbuckle—the guests marched out to dinner, Lord Arbuckle leading with the wife of the Prime Minister; Lady Arbuckle bringing up the rear with the Rajah, without that lady having the dimmest idea as to whether all her guests were present or not.
"Sir John found himself next to a Roumanian woman who had spent three-quarters of her life in Persia, and Lady Catnall sat beside a bald-headed scientist from Berlin who spoke English as if he were cracking nuts. None of the four had ever heard of the others' existence.
"The dinner was the usual deadly dull affair. The Prime Minister smiled and beamed over his high collar and emitted platitudes that anybody could print without getting the faintest idea of his meaning; and the Rajah peppered and ate with hardly a word of any kind to the lady next him, who talked incessantly; the Scientist jabbered German, completely ignorant of the fact that Lady Catnall could not understand a word of what he said, and the other great personages—especially the women—looked through their lorgnons and studied the menagerie.
"When the port had been served and the ladies had risen to leave the men to their cigars, Sir John Catnall conducted the Roumanian-Persian combination to the drawing-room door, clicked his heels, bent his back in a salaam, and with a certain anxious look on his face hurried back to the dining-room, and seeing the seat next Lord Arbuckle temporarily empty slid into it, laid his bronzed hand on his host's thin, white, blue-veined wrist, and said in a voice trembling with suppressed emotion:
"'We got your wife's note and came at once, although our boxes are still unpacked. I could hardly get through the dinner I have been so anxious, but we arrived so late I could not ask your wife—indeed you were already moving in to dinner when your man brought us in. I am in London, as you know, to consult an oculist, for my eyesight is greatly impaired, and he called professionally just as I was leaving my lodgings.' Then bending over Lord Arbuckle he said in a voice tremulous with emotion, 'Tell me now about Eliza; is she really as badly off as your wife thinks?'
"Arbuckle had learned one thing during his long life with Catherine, never, as you Americans say, to 'give her away.' The identity of the partly blind, sunburned man, with half a cataract over each eye, who was gazing at him so intently awaiting an answer from his lips, was as much of a mystery to him as was the particular malady with which the unknown Eliza was afflicted or the contents of his wife's letter. Instantly Lord Arbuckle's face took on a grave and serious expression.
"'Yes,' he answered slowly; 'yes, I regret to say that it is all true.'
"'Good God!' ejaculated the stranger, 'you don't say so. Terrible! Terrible!' and without another word he rose from his seat, tarried for a moment at the mantel gazing into the coals, and then slowly rejoined the ladies.
"When the last guest had departed Arbuckle, who had been smothering a fire of indignation over the stranger's inquiry and at the uncomfortable position in which his wife had placed him, owing to her never consulting him about her guests or her correspondence, shut the door of the drawing-room so the servants could not hear and burst out with: