"You have the pleasure to know my kind friend, M. Byewater?" she asked, with a graceful wave of the hand toward that excellent youth, who had ceased to lounge against the wall and stood rather anxiously upright, the blankness of unexpected discomfiture upon his ingenuous countenance.
"Incontestably I have the pleasure of knowing M. Byewater," Adrian replied. "I have also had the pleasure of reading, and further, of publishing, two of his a little—yes, I fear, perhaps just a little—lengthy articles."
"I did condense all I knew," Byewater put in ruefully, addressing his hostess. "But I presume I was over-weighted by the amount of my material."
"Quite so; and the whole secret both of style and of holding your reader's attention lies in selection, in the intuitive knowledge of what to leave out," Adrian declared, his eyes fixed with positively ferocious jealousy upon la belle Gabrielle's partially averted face.
That poor, inoffensive Byewater should receive this public roasting was flagrantly unjust, Anastasia felt, still she abstained from intervention. The silence which followed was critical. She refused to break it. The responsibility of doing so appeared to her too great. One or other of the two principal actors in the little scene must undertake that. She really couldn't. At last, coldly, unwilling, as though forced against her inclination to speak, Madame St. Leger, turning to Adrian Savage, said:
"It is long since we have any news of him. How is M. Dax?"
Adrian shrugged his shoulders.
"I have not heard, chère Madame," he replied.
Whereupon Miss Beauchamp, satisfied that, whether for good or ill, relations were safely established between this altogether dear and not a little perverse young couple, called cheerfully to the American youth.
"Come here, come here, Mr. Byewater. I have hardly had one word with you all this afternoon, and there is something I greatly wish to ask you. What is this that I hear about our good, clever Mr. Stacpole's leaving for New York?"