He would give it to her when they were alone, and would tell her that it was nothing but a seal for her writing-case, a common green stone of some kind with a little Greek head on it; and she would look at it and think it pretty, and take it, because it did not look very valuable to her unpractised eye.

But the 'common green stone' was a great emerald, and the 'little Greek head' was an intaglio of Anacreon, cut some two thousand and odd hundred years ago by an art that is lost; and the setting had been made and chiselled for Maria de' Medici when she married Henry the Fourth of France.

Logotheti liked to give Margaret things vastly more rare than she guessed them to be.
Margaret offered her visitors tea, and she and Logotheti took theirs while the others looked on or devoured the cake and bread and butter.
'Tea ?' repeated Signor Stromboli.

'I am well.

Why should I take tea?
The tea is for to perspire when I have a cold.' The Signorina Baci-Roventi laughed at him.
'Do you not know that the English drink tea before dinner to give themselves an appetite ?' she asked.