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There was
no mistaking the malicious triumph in his eyes as
he glanced from the face of the blissfully unconscious
hostess to a sofa at the end of the room.
She understood at once; he had brought his mistress
here under some false colour, which had
deceived no one but Signora Grassini.
The gipsy-girl was leaning back on the sofa,
surrounded by a group of simpering dandies and
blandly ironical cavalry officers. She was gorgeously
dressed in amber and scarlet, with an
Oriental brilliancy of tint and profusion of ornament
as startling in a Florentine literary salon
as if she had been some tropical bird among
sparrows and starlings. She herself seemed to
feel out of place, and looked at the offended
ladies with a fiercely contemptuous scowl. Catching
sight of the Gadfly as he crossed the room
with Gemma, she sprang up and came towards
him, with a voluble flood of painfully incorrect
French.
"M. Rivarez, I have been looking for you everywhere!
Count Saltykov wants to know whether
you can go to his villa to-morrow night.


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