"Lady who?" gasped Peaches. "Gee-whiz! Who do you think we are?"
"Great Scott!" said the inadvertent guest. "Aren't you Lord and Lady Gordon?"
"Lord and Lady me eye!" remarked Peaches. "We are not!"
"Then why on earth did you call to me?" exclaimed the young man. "And who are you?"
Just then the Citrus King leaned forward and shouted a query against the wind.
"Who is your young man, Peaches?" he said. "Make me acquainted."
"I don't know who he is!" snapped his daughter. "Who are you yourself?" she demanded of him. "I am a low-life American bourgeois in trade and every bally thing—name of Alicia Pegg; and this is my father, Pinto Pegg, the Citrus King, and this is my chaperon, Miss Talbot, that I'm taking abroad to educate. Now who are you?"
"My name is Sandro di Monteventi," he said, getting out a little gold cardcase, from which he extricated a visiting card bearing a five-pointed coronet and the inscription Monteventi. A duke! As I glimpsed the card, which with proper breeding he handed first to me, I nearly fainted. We must have made a mistake somehow. Yet he was undoubtedly the young man of the theater. I could not have made so monstrous an error. As for Peaches, when I handed it on to her she simply gave a frank stare and a long whistle.
"Pleased to meet you, duke!" she said. "I guess we may have made a mistake. We thought—well, we thought you were a friend of ours—but I don't quite see how you fell for it. Dicky, turn round and take the gentleman back!"