None of them—not even Mr. Raycie—had travelled as extensively as it was intended that Lewis should; but the two Huzzards had been twice to England on banking matters, and Commodore Ledgely, a bold man, to France and Belgium as well—not to speak of his early experiences in the Far East. All three had kept a vivid and amused recollection slightly tinged with disapprobation, of what they had seen—“Oh, those French wenches,” the Commodore chuckled through his white teeth—but poor Mr. Kent, who had gone abroad on his honeymoon, had been caught in Paris by the revolution of 1830, had had the fever in Florence, and had nearly been arrested as a spy in Vienna; and the only satisfactory episode in this disastrous, and never repeated, adventure, had been the fact of his having been mistaken for the Duke of Wellington (as he was trying to slip out of a Viennese hotel in his courier’s blue surtout) by a crowd who had been—“Well, very gratifying in their enthusiasm,” Mr. Kent admitted.

            “How my poor brother Julius could have lived in Europe! Well, look at the consequences—” he used to say, as if poor Treeshy’s plainness gave an awful point to his moral.

            “There’s one thing in Paris, my boy, that you must be warned against: those gambling-hells in the Pally Royle,” Mr. Kent insisted. “I never set foot in the places myself; but a glance at the outside was enough.”

            “I knew a feller that was fleeced of a fortune there,” Mr. Henry Huzzard confirmed; while the Commodore, at his tenth glass, chuckled with moist eyes: “The trollops, oh, the trollops—”

            “As for Vienna—” said Mr. Kent.

            “Even in London,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “a young man must be on his look-out against gamblers. Every form of swindling is practised, and the touts are always on the look-out for greenhorns; a term,” he added apologetically, “which they apply to any traveller new to the country.”

            “In Paris,” said Mr. Kent, “I was once within an ace of being challenged to fight a duel.” He fetched a sigh of horror and relief, and glanced reassuredly down the Sound in the direction of his own peaceful roof-tree.

            “Oh, a duel,” laughed the Commodore. “A man can fight duels here. I fought a dozen when I was a young feller in New Erleens.” The Commodore’s mother had been a southern lady, and after his father’s death had spent some years with her parents in Louisiana, so that her son’s varied experiences had begun early. “‘Bout women,” he smiled confidentially, holding out his empty glass to Mr. Raycie.

            “The ladies—!” exclaimed Mr. Kent in a voice of warning.

            The gentlemen rose to their feet, the Commodore quite as promptly and steadily as the others. The drawing-room window opened, and from it emerged Mrs. Raycie, in a ruffled sarsenet dress and Point de Paris cap, followed by her two daughters in starched organdy with pink spencers. Mr. Raycie looked with proud approval at his womenkind.

            “Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Raycie, in a perfectly even voice, “supper is on the table, and if you will do Mr. Raycie and myself the favour—”

            “The favour ma’am,” said Mr. Ambrose Huzzard, “is on your side, in so amiably inviting us.”

            Mrs. Raycie curtsied, the gentlemen bowed, and Mr. Raycie said: “Your arm to Mrs. Raycie, Huzzard. This little farewell party is a family affair, and the other gentlemen must content themselves with my two daughters. Sarah Anne, Mary Adeline—”

            The Commodore and Mr. John Huzzard advanced ceremoniously toward the two girls, and Mr. Kent, being a cousin, closed the procession between Mr. Raycie and Lewis.

            Oh, that supper table! The vision of it used sometimes to rise before Lewis Raycie’s eyes in outlandish foreign places; for though not a large or fastidious eater when he was at home, he was afterward, in lands of chestnut-flour and garlic and queer bearded sea-things, to suffer many pangs of hunger at the thought of that opulent board. In the centre stood the Raycie epergne of pierced silver, holding aloft a bunch of June roses surrounded by dangling baskets of sugared almonds and striped peppermints; and grouped about this decorative “motif” were Lowestoft platters heavy with piles of raspberries, strawberries and the first Delaware peaches.