Chapter 11 - Page 2

it at once.

"Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He's going to
marry Coral next," she laughed out, flashing the joke around the
table with all her practiced flippancy.

"Lord!" grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince
displayed the unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of
practicing every morning with his Mueller exercises.

Suddenly Susy felt Strefford's eyes upon her.

"What's the matter with me? Too much rouge?" she asked, passing
her arm in his as they left the table.

"No: too little. Look at yourself," he answered in a low tone.

"Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks
fished up from the canal!"

She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the
sala, hands on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and
young Breckenridge caught her up, and she spun back with the
latter, while Gillow-it was believed to be his sole
accomplishment-snapped his fingers in simulation of bones, and
shuffled after the couple on stamping feet.

Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with a
floating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for
the gondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.

"Well, what next--this ain't all, is it?" Gillow presently
queried, from the divan where he lolled half-asleep with
dripping brow. Fred Gillow, like Nature, abhorred a void, and
it was inconceivable to him that every hour of man's rational
existence should not furnish a motive for getting up and going
somewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view, and
the Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company that
somebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.

Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he'd just come
back from there, and proposed that they should go out on foot
for a change.

"Why not? What fun!" Susy was up in an instant. "Let's pay
somebody a surprise visit--I don't know who! Streffy, Prince,
can't you think of somebody who'd be particularly annoyed by our
arrival?"

"Oh, the list's too long. Let's start, and choose our victim on
the way," Strefford suggested.

Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing her
high-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. There
was no moon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hung
over them as close as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped on
them from garden-walls. Susy's heart tightened with memories of
Como.

They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to the
drifting whims of aimless people. Presently someone proposed
taking a nearer look at the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and
they hailed a gondola and were rowed