CHAPTER II.

MOMENTS.

At the little dinner which Lady Richard's absence rendered more easy there were only the Benyon brothers (a wag had recently suggested that they should convert themselves into Quisanté Limited), Mrs. Gellatly, Morewood the painter, and the honoured guest. Morewood was there because he was painting a kit-cat of Quisanté for the host (Heaven knew in what corner Lady Richard would suffer it to hang), and Mrs. Gellatly because she had expressed a desire to meet Lady May Gaston. Quisanté greeted May with an elaborate air of remembrance; his handshake was so ornate as to persuade her that she must always hate him, and that Dick Benyon was as foolish as his wife thought him. This mood lasted half through dinner; the worst of Quisanté was uppermost, and the exhibition depressed the others. The brothers were apologetic, Mrs. Gellatly gallantly suave; her much-lined, still pretty face worked in laborious smiles at every loudness and every awkwardness. Morewood was so savage that an abrupt conclusion of the entertainment threatened to be necessary. May, who had previously decided that Mr. Quisanté would be much better in company, was travelling to the conclusion that he was not nearly so trying when alone; to be weaselly is not so bad as to be inconsiderate and ostentatious.

Just then came the change which transformed the party. Somebody mentioned Mahomet; Morewood, with his love of a paradox, launched on an indiscriminate championship of the Prophet. Next to believing in nobody, it was best, he said, to believe in Mahomet; there, he maintained, you got most out of your religion and gave least to it; and he defended the criterion with his usual uncompromising aggressiveness. Then Quisanté put his arms on the table, interrupted Morewood without apology, and began to talk. May thought that she would not have known how good the talk was—for it came so easily—had she not seen how soon Morewood became a listener, or even a foil, ready and content to put his questions not as puzzles but as provocatives. Yet Morewood was proverbially conceited, and he was fully a dozen years Quisanté's senior. She stole a look round; the brothers were open-mouthed, Mrs. Gellatly looked almost frightened. Next her eyes scanned Quisanté's face; he was not weaselly now, nor ostentatious. His subject filled him and lit him up; she did not know that he looked as he had when he spoke to old Maria of his Empress among women, but she knew that he looked as if nothing mentally small, nothing morally mean, nothing that was not in some way or other, for good or evil, big and spacious could ever come near him from without or proceed out from him.

She was immensely startled when, in a pause, her host whispered in her ear,"One of his moments!" The phrase was to become very familiar to her on the lips of others, even more in her own thoughts."His moments!" It implied a sort of intermittent inspiration, as though he were some ancient prophet or mediæval fanatic through whose mouth Heaven spoke sometimes, leaving him for the rest to his own low and carnal nature. The phrase meant at once a plenitude of inspiration and a rarity of it. Not days, nor hours, but moments were seemingly what his friends valued him for, what his believers attached their faith to,