I

Mrs. Malwood was hipped. She had been losing heavily at bridge, her Pomeranian had been run over in Berkeley Square and taken to the dog’s hospital, her most recent flame had just been married to his colonel’s daughter, and her fourth husband was still alive. Poor little soul, she had lots to grumble about. So she had come round to be cheered up by Feo Fallaray who always managed to laugh through deaths and epidemics to find her friend in the first stages of being dressed for dinner. She had explained her mental attitude, received a hearty kiss and been told to lie down and make herself comfortable. There she was, at the moment, in one of the peculiar frocks which had become almost like the uniform of Feo’s “gang.” She was not old, except in experience. In fact, she was not more than twenty-three. But as she lay on the sofa with her eyes closed and her lashes like black fans on her cheeks, a little pout on her pretty mouth and her bobbed head resting upon a brilliant cushion, she looked, in those clothes of hers, like a school girl whose headmistress was a woman of an aesthetic turn of mind but with a curious penchant for athleticism. Underneath her smock of duvetyn, the color of a ripe horse-chestnut, she wore bloomers and stockings rolled down under her knees,—as everybody could see. She might have been a rather swagger girl scout who never scouted, and there was just a touch of masculinity about her without anything muscular. She was, otherwise, so tiny a thing that any sort of a man could have taken her up in one hand and held her above his head. Very different from Lady Feo, whose shoulders were broad, whose bones were large, who stood five foot ten without her shoes, who could hand back anything that was given to her and swing a golf club like a man.

“I’ve just been dipping into Margot’s Diary, Georgie. Topping stuff. I wish to God she were young again,—one of us. She’d make things hum. I can’t understand why the critics have all thrown so many vitriolic fits about her book and called her the master egotist. Don’t they know the meaning of words and isn’t this an autobiography? Good Lord, if any woman has a right to be egotistical it’s Margot. She did everything well and to my way of thinking she writes better than all the novelists alive. She can sum up a character as well in ten lines as all our verbose young men in ten chapters. In her next book I hope to heaven she’ll get her second wind and put a searchlight into Downing Street. Her poor old bird utterly lost his tail but the public ought to know to what depths of trickery and meanness politics can be carried.—You can make that iron a bit hotter if you like, Lola. Don’t be afraid of it.”

Lola gave her a glint of smile and laid the iron back on its stand.

During the process of being dressed, Lady Feo reclined in a sort of barber’s chair—not covered with a peignoir or a filmy dressing jacket but in what is called in America a union suit—a one-piece thing of silk with no sleeves and cut like rowing shorts. It became her tremendously well,—cool and calm and perfectly satisfied with herself. She glanced at Lola, who stood quiet and efficient in a neat frock of black alpaca, with her golden hair done closely to her small head, and then winked at Georgie and gave a hitch to her elbow to call attention to the new maid whom she had already broken in and regarded as the latest actor in her private theatricals. Her whole life was a sort of play in which she took the leading part.

There was something in that large and airy bedroom which always did Mrs. Malwood good. She liked its Spartan simplicity, its white walls, white furniture, white carpet and the curtains and cushions which were of delicate water-color tones suggestive of sweet peas. It had once been wholly black as a background for Lady Feo’s dead-white skin. But her friend had grown out of that, as she grew out of almost everything sooner or later.

“New, isn’t she?” asked Mrs. Malwood without lowering her voice.

“A month old,” replied Lady Feo, “and becoming more and more useful every moment. Aren’t you, Lola?”

Lola bowed and smiled and once more put the hot tongs to the thick wiry hair which eventually would stand out around her mistress’s head like that of some Hawaiian girl.

“Where did you pick her up?” asked Georgie.

“She fell into my lap like a ripe plum. She’s a niece of my Breezy, the housekeeper. You’d never think it, would you? I’m more and more inclined to believe, as a matter of fact, that she escaped from a china cabinet from a collection of Dresden pieces.”

Mrs. Malwood perched herself upon an elbow and examined Lola languidly,—who was quite used to this sort of thing, having already been discussed openly before innumerable people as though she were a freak.

They little knew how closely Lola was studying them in turn,—their manner, their accent, their tricks of phrase and for what purpose she was undergoing this apprenticeship. Out for sensation, they would certainly have attained a thrilling one could they have seen into the mind of this discreet and industrious girl who performed her duties with the deftest fingers and went about like a disembodied spirit.

“Where are you dining?”

“Here,” said Lady Feo. “I’ve got half a dozen of Arthur’s friendly enemies coming. It will be a sort of Cabinet meeting. They’re all in a frightful stew about his attitude on the Irish question. They know that he and I are not what the papers call ‘in sympathy,’ so why the dickens they’ve invited themselves I don’t know,—in the hope, I suppose, of my being able to work on his feelings and get him to climb down from his high horse. The little Welshman is the last man to cod himself that his position is anything but extremely rocky and he knows that he can’t afford to lose the support of a man like Arthur, whose honesty is sworn to by every Tom, Dick and Harry in the land; this is in the way of a dernier ressort, I suppose. I shall be the only woman present. Pity me among this set of indecisive second-raters who are all in a dead funk and utterly unable to cope with the situation, either in Germany, France, Ireland, India or anywhere else and have messed up the whole show. If I had Margot’s pen, just think what a ripping chapter I could write in my diary if I kept one, eh, Georgie?” She threw back her head and laughed.

As far as Fallaray’s hard-and-fast stand against reprisals was concerned she cared nothing. In fact, Ireland was a word with which she was completely fed up. She had erased it from her dictionary. It meant nothing to her that British officers were being murdered in their beds and thrown at the feet of their wives or that the scum of the army had blacked and tanned their way through a country burning with passion and completely mad. The evening was just one of a series of stunts to her out of which she would derive great amusement and be provided with enough chitchat to give her friends gusts of mirth for weeks.

“I saw Fallaray to-day,” said Georgie. “He was walking in the Park. He only needs a suit of armor to look like Richard Coeur de Lion. Is he really and honestly sincere, Feo, or is this a political trick to get the Welshman out of Downing Street? I ask because I don’t believe that any man can have been in the House as long as he has and remain clean.”

“Don’t you know,” said Lady Feo, with only the merest glint of smile, “that Arthur has been divinely appointed to save civilization from chaos? Don’t you know that?”

“Yes, but I know a good many of the others who have—when any one’s looking. You really can’t make me believe in these people, especially since the War. Such duds, my dear.”

“All the same, you can believe in Arthur.” She spoke seriously. “He has no veneer, no dishonesty, no power of escape from his own standards of life. That’s why he and I are like oil and water. We don’t speak the same language. He reminds me always of an Evangelist at a fancy-dress ball, or Cromwell at a varsity binge. He’s a wonderful dull dog, is Arthur, absolutely out of place in English politics and it’s perfectly ridiculous that he should be married to me. God knows why I did it. His profile fascinated me, probably, and the way he played tennis. I was dippy about both those things at the time. I’m awfully sorry for him, too. He needs a wife,—a nice cowlike creature with no sense of humor who would lick his boots, put eau de cologne on his high forehead, run to meet him with a little cry of adoration and spring out of bed to turn on his bath when he came home in the middle of the night. All Cromwells do and don’t they love the smell of powder!—Good for you, Lola. Don’t you get frightfully fed up with this thick wiry hair of mine?”

Lola smiled and shook her head. It was only when she was alone with her mistress that she permitted herself to answer questions. But as she listened and with a burning heart heard her hero discussed and dismissed and knew, better and more certainly than ever, the things that he needed, one phrase ran like a recurring motif through her brain,—the rustle of silk, the rustle of silk.

II

Lola and Miss Breezy were not on speaking terms.

The elderly spinster considered that she had been used and flouted, treated as though she were in her dotage and had lost her authority to engage and dismiss the members of the Fallaray mÉnage. She had nursed, therefore, a feeling of bitter antagonism against Lola during her three weeks under the same roof. She had not treated her niece to anything in the nature of an outburst on her return from Queen’s Road to take up her duties. “Dignity, dignity,” she repeated again and again and steeled herself with two other wonderful words that have helped so many similar women in the great crisis of wounded vanity,—“my position.” She had simply cut her dead. Since then they had, of course, met frequently and had even been obliged to speak to each other. They did so as though they were totally unrelated and had never met before.

All this led to a certain amount of comedy below stairs, it being perfectly well known to every one that Lola was the housekeeper’s niece. What Lola did when Miss Breezy entered the servants’ sitting room the night of her arrival filled the maids with astonishment, resentment and admiration,—astonishment because of her extraordinary capacity of holding in her laughter, resentment because she treated Miss Breezy with the sort of respect which that good lady never got from them, and admiration because of the innate breeding which seemed to ooze from that child’s finger tips. She had risen to her feet. And ever since she had continued to do so—a thing, the possibility of which the others had never conceived—and when spoken to had replied, “Yes, Miss Breezy,” with a perfectly straight face and not one glint of humor in her eye. It was wonderful. It was like something in a book,—an old book by a man who wrote of times that were as dead as mutton. It was gorgeous. It gave the girls the stitch from laughing. It became one of their standard jokes. “Up for Miss Breezy,” the word went after that and there was a scramble out of chairs. All this made the elderly spinster angrier than ever. Not only had she been done by this girl but, my word, the child was rubbing it in.

It was curious to see the effect that Lola had upon the other servants. They were all tainted with the Bolshevism that has followed in the wake of the War. They drew their wages and grumbled, slurred their duties, ate everything that they could lay their hands on, thought nothing of destroying the utensils of the kitchen and the various things which they used in the course of work, went out as often as they could and stayed out much later than the rules of the house permitted. But under the subtle influence of this always smiling, always good-tempered girl who seemed to have come from another planet, ribaldry and coarse jokes and the rather loose larking with the footmen began gradually to disappear. Without resentment, because Lola was so companionable and fitted into her new surroundings like a key into a lock, they toned themselves down in her presence, and finding her absolutely without “side,” hurried to win her friendship, went into her room at night, singly, to confide in her,—were not in the least jealous because Albert Simpkins, the butler and the two footmen competed with one another to grovel at her feet. In a word, Lola was as great a favorite below stairs as she was above. She had realized that the ultimate success of her plan depended on her popularity in the servants’ sitting room and in winning these people to her side had used all her homogeneous sense, even, perhaps, with greater care and thoughtfulness than she had applied to her task of ingratiating herself with Lady Feo. She knew very well that if the servants didn’t get on with her she would never be able to stay. They would make it impossible.

How Madame de BrÉzÉ would have chuckled had she been able to see her little imitator sitting on the sofa at night, beneath an oleograph of Queen Victoria, going through the current Tatler in the midst of a group of maids, with a butler and two footmen hanging over her shoulders and a perfect valet dreaming of matrimony sitting astride a chair as near as he could get. How she would have laughed at her descendant’s small quips and touches of wit and irony as she discussed the people who were known to her companions by sight and by name and seemed to belong to a sort of menagerie, separated from them by the iron bars of class distinction through which they could be seen moving about,—well fed and well groomed and performing for the public.

It was no trouble to Lola to do all this. She had done it almost all her life with the gradations of children with whom she had been at school,—admired by the girls, keeping the boys at arms’ length and yet retaining their friendship. It was perfectly easy. Lady Feo had liked her instantly and so no effort was necessary. Tactfulness alone was required,—to be silent when her mistress obviously required silence, to be merry and bright when her mood was expansive and to anticipate her wishes whenever in attendance. All Lola’s period of make-believe, during which she had played the celebrated courtesan in her little back bedroom, had taught her precisely how to conduct herself in her new surroundings. Had not she herself been in the hands of just such a lady’s maid as she had now become and seen her laugh when she had laughed, remain quiet when she had demanded quietude? It merely meant that she had exchanged roles with Lady Feo for a time and was playing the servant’s part instead of that of the leading lady. She reveled in the whole thing. It gave her constant delight and pleasure. Above all, she was under the same roof as her hero, of whom she caught a momentary glimpse from time to time,—from the window as he got into his car, from the gallery above the hall as he came back from the House of Commons, or late at night when he passed along the corridor to his lonely rooms, sometimes tired and with dragging feet, sometimes scornful and impatient, and once or twice so blazing with anger that it was a wonder that the things he touched did not burst into flames.

III

The only one of the servants who took the remotest interest in the arrival of those members of the Cabinet who were to dine with Lady Feo was Lola. With the butler’s connivance she stood inside the hat room in the hall and peeped through the door. To her there was something not only indescribably interesting in the sight at close quarters of men of whom she had read daily for years and who were admired or loathed by her father and his friends, but something moving, because they had it in their power to help or hinder the work of Fallaray. She found them to be a curiously smug and well-fed lot, undistinguished, badly dressed and not very different from the ordinary run of Queen’s Road tradesmen. She thought that they looked like piano tuners and was astonished and disappointed.

The most important person, who arrived late and whose face was of course familiar to her from caricatures, made up for all the rest. He stood in the full light for a moment while he gave his coat and hat to a footman,—a soft dump hat and a coat lined with very shiny black satin. He looked more than ever like a quack doctor, one who was a cross between a comedian and a revivalist. His uncut hair, very white now, flopped over the back of his collar in a most uncivilized manner and his little moustache of the walrus type was quite out of keeping with it. If he had been clean-shaven he could have passed for a poet, or a dramatist who desired to advertise the fact, as some of them do who flourished in the Victorian period. His short plebeian figure, with legs far too small and apparently too frail to carry his fat little trunk, gave him a gnome-like appearance, but in his eyes, which were very wonderful, there was a gleam of humor and resourcefulness which stamped him as a consummate leader of men, while his forehead denoted imagination and keen intelligence. It made Lola laugh to see the way in which he tried to win the callous footman with a cheery word, never losing an opportunity of making a client, and to watch his rabbit-like way of going upstairs to the drawing-room.

She was met by Simpkins, who darted quickly and eagerly to her side. “Look ’ere,” he said in a whisper. “You’re free for the evening. How about doing a show with me? I can get you back before Lady Feo’ll want you again. What d’yer say?”

“Yes,” said Lola, “I should love it. What shall we see?”

Simpkins was a gallery first nighter and an ardent patron of the drama. Whatever he recommended, therefore, was sure to be worth seeing. “Well,” he said, “there’s Irene Vanbrugh in a new American play,—‘Miss Nell o’ New Orleans.’ I couldn’t get to see it but I read old man Walkley and I saw what Punch said. I don’t think the play’s much, but Irene is orlright. Nip up and get your things on. Let’s go and test it.”

Lola nipped. Her little bedroom was in the servants’ corridor. She was lucky that it wasn’t, like most servants’ bedrooms, in the basement, cheek by jowl with the coal cellar. She changed quickly, excited at the prospect of stealing a few hours away from the house in Dover Street. She had been home twice on her nights off, there to be gazed at in silent wonder by the little mother who seemed to know her even less than ever and to be put through an exhaustive cross-examination by her father, whose mind ran to small details, as was natural in one who wore a magnifying glass perpetually in his eye. She met Simpkins in the servants’ sitting room,—very spruce in a tail coat and a bowler with his black tie ingeniously pulled through a gold ring in which there was a most depressed diamond.

She was received with a chorus of inquiries from the maids. “Hello, Lola,” “On the loose with Simpky?” “This is something new, ain’t it?” “Going to do the shimmy in ’Ammersmith?” and so forth. To all of which she replied in one sentence. “Mr. Simpkins is taking me to an organ recital,” and won a scream of mirth.

Simpkins was ecstatic. He had made a bet with himself that his appeal would be refused. Always before Lola had turned him down and he knew that the frequent pestering of the butler and the two footmen had been unable to move her to adventure. “We’ve just time to do it,” he said, put two fingers into his mouth and sent a piercing whistle into the muggy April evening. A prowling taxi drew up short and quivered, and a well-shaped head looked round to see from whom this urgent call had issued. Taking Lola’s hand, Simpkins ran her across the street and opened the door. “The Dooker York’s.”

“Righto, Sir,” said the driver, giving a quick and appreciative glance at his customer’s companion. Exactly three years ago the owner of that particularly nice voice, straight nose and small moustache had commanded a battery of the R. F. A. and fired with open sights at the advancing enemy. With nothing to eat except apples plucked from the orchards through which he had retired with his ragged and weakening men, he had fought coolly and cheerily for many days and nights, utterly out of touch with the main army and eventually, looking like a scarecrow, had removed his guns from impossible positions and fallen on his face in Amiens. Thus does a grateful Parliament reward its saviors.

Simpkins slipped his hand through Lola’s arm. “I’ve been looking forward to this,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ve done for me. I’m a different man since I saw you first.”

“I,” said Lola quickly, “am precisely the same girl,” and very kindly and definitely gave him back his hand and drew a little farther into her corner of the cab. But Simpkins wasn’t hurt. On the contrary he esteemed her the more highly for this action. She proved herself so to be different from the girls with whom he was acquainted and thus lived up to his preconceived idea of her. “Sorry,” he said, “thank you,” and glowed with love.

It was perfectly true that Simpkins was a different man since he had seen Lola. She had revolutionized his life and his thoughts and strengthened his ambitions. He was a good fellow, clean-minded, with one or two ideals to which he had clung faithfully and well through the many temptations which were provided by his like below stairs. He had character. He was illiterate but not unintelligent. He had something that the human sensibility is frequently without,—a soul, and because of that he had imagination and a sense of worship. He was the sort of man of whom fanatics are made under a crisis of deep emotion. As a gentleman’s gentleman he regarded himself as having a sort of mission in life. He must be honest, always ready for his master’s call; spruce, cheerful and discreet. When tempted to make himself acquainted with the contents of private letters he must never give anything away. He had held himself in waiting, so to speak, for a great love affair and had built up in his mind a good and wholesome picture of home and wife and children. Lola fitted into this picture and dominated it as no other girl had ever done, and he had fallen actually and metaphorically before her like a shack before a hurricane. At any time now he could leave service and branch out for himself, because he had inherited from his father a sum of money which would enable him to buy a public house somewhere in the country—preferably on the upper Thames—and let rooms to nice people,—they would have to be nice people. He was a man in the middle thirties with plenty of time to add to his good nest egg, bring up a little family with great care and put his son in a good school with a view to making him a gentleman,—a dentist perhaps, or a clerk in Coutts’s bank. He could see only Lola as the mother of this boy and the fact that she had accepted his invitation to go to the theater filled him with a great hopefulness; he rejoiced in her having disallowed his familiarity.

To Lola, Simpkins was less than the dust. She had already sized him up as a rather curious character to be respected and even liked but not, of course, to be considered as anything but an infrequent escort into the theater life of London.

She placed him among the Treadwells,—though not so high up in the list as Ernest. One of these fine days she hoped to be able to lift the Bayswater poet out of the public library into the public gaze, to do for him what Madame de BrÉzÉ had done for Paul Brissac.

They arrived at the theater in good time. With a curious touch of embarrassment, because he had seen at once that the cab was being driven by a gentleman, Simpkins handed over half a crown and said, “That’s all right, you can keep the change.” He received a crisp and unabashed “Thank you” and a little bow from the waist down which was a cross between extreme politeness and ineffable cheek, and before Lola turned to go into the theater she was given a pucka salute with the hand almost flat upon the ear. She returned a smile that was like one of those electric advertisements which flick in and out of the sky in all really progressive American cities. It nearly knocked the man over and almost caused him to collide with a policeman.

Simpkins was tempted to buy two seats in the stalls and could have done so without question in these after-war times when almost the only people who have enough money for their laundresses are the profiteers. But tradition prevailed and he took her up to the dress circle,—where nobody dressed. The people were coming reluctantly into the theater in the usual manner of Londoners. English people are not ardent theater goers and have to be dragged in to see a play almost in the same manner as in the old days of barnstorming, when the manager beat a drum on the threshold of the tent, the hero and the heroine stood at his elbow and made pathetic appeals to passers-by, and the villain, lurking in the background, grimaced at all the girls.

The orchestra had just begun to tune up and the scraping of fiddles sent a tingle through Lola’s veins. It put her in the mood, as it always did, to forget life, her own personality and the presence of Simpkins, and place herself into the character of the play’s heroine. From an unexpected pocket Simpkins brought out a small box of chocolates. He was one of those strange people who, although they have just risen from a hearty meal, cannot go through an evening at the theater without munching something. “’Ave one,” he said. “They’re nice.”

“You think of everything,” said Lola, and in order not to hurt his feelings, took one and dropped it under the seat. “There’s going to be a good house,” she added.

“Irene always draws ’em in. By Gum, she’s given me some good evenings in her time. She’s what I call safe. You can bank on her. She dresses like a lady, too, and that gets me. Good old Irene.” And then he put his face rather close to Lola’s. “Some one said you thought of going on the stage before you joined us. That’s not true, is it?”

“No,” said Lola. “Not in the least true. I discussed it with my aunt. In fact, to be quite honest, I put it to her head like a pistol.”

“Oh, I see.” Simpkins heaved a sigh of relief. If Lola were to go on the stage,—and all these young officers buzzing about, treating marriage as though it were a betting transaction——

“I think,” said Lola with naÏve gravity, “that it’s better to play a leading part in life than to be in the chorus on the stage. Cleverer acting is required, too, don’t you think so?”

A leading part in life? Simpkins was worried. Would she consider the wife of a man who owned the “Black Bell” at Wargrave to be a leading part? “You’re not ambitious, are yer?” he asked, peering at her patrician profile.

“Oh,” she said, “Oh,” and suddenly threw out her hands.

And then the lights went out and the buzz of talking ceased gradually as though bees were retiring in platoons from a feeding place.

IV

They walked to Trafalgar Square. Lola was still in the old garden of Miss Nell among the Creoles and the music of the Mardi Gras frolickers. She had no ears for the expert criticisms of her escort. There were plenty of unoccupied taxis scouting for fares but Lola pulled up under the shadow of the National Gallery to watch the big play of life for a moment or two. From force of a habit which she had not yet conquered, she looked up at the sky, half expecting to see the great white beams of searchlights swing and stammer until they focussed upon something that looked like a silver fish, and then to twinge under the quick reports of anti-aircraft guns. Twice during the War she had been caught on that spot during a raid and had stood transfixed to the pavement between fright and a keen desire to see the show. Memories of those never-to-be-forgotten incidents, small as they were and of no consequence in the story of the War—the loss of a few well-fed noncombatants who made themselves targets for stray shrapnel because they wouldn’t dip like rabbits into funk holes—came back to her then, as well they might. The War’s evidences forced themselves every day upon the notice even of those who desired to forget,—the processions of unemployed with their rattling collection boxes among the ugliest of them all.

Big Ben struck the quarter and Lola returned to earth. “Simpky,” she said, “cab, quick.” And he called one and gave the address. And then she began again to hear what the valet was saying. He had used up Miss Nell o’ New Orleans and had come to Miss Lola of Queen’s Road, Bayswater. “Look ’ere, can’t we do this often, you and me? We can always sneak off when there’s a dinner on or Lady Feo’s out in the push. It don’t cost much and I’ve got plenty of money.”

“I should like to very much,” said Lola. “Once a fortnight, say. You see, I go home every Wednesday night. I don’t think we ought to do it more often than once a fortnight because, after all, I feel rather responsible to Auntie and I don’t want to set a bad example to the other girls.”

“Well, promise you won’t go out with the other men. I let you into the ’ouse first, don’t forget that, and that was a sort of omen to me and if you could bring yourself to look upon me as—well——” He broke off nervously and ran his hand over his forehead, which was damp with excitement.

But Lola was not in the least nonplussed. She had had so much practice. She was an expert in mentally making all sorts and conditions of men her brothers. She said, “Simpky,”—although the man looked extremely un-Russian,—“you mustn’t spoil me. Also you must remember that Ellen Glazeby has hopes. She’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh, my God,” said Simpkins, with a touch of melodrama. “If I’d been engaged to ’er and on the verge of marriage, and then ’ad seen you,—or even if I’d been married for a couple of years and was ’appy and ’ad seen you——Religious as I am——”

Lola turned to him with extreme simplicity. “But I’m a good girl, Simpky,” she said.

And he gave a funny throaty sound, like a frog at night with its feet in water; and one of his hands fluttered out and caught hold of the end of Lola’s piece of fur, and this he pressed to his lips. “Oh, my God,” he said again, words failing.

And so Lola was rather glad when the cab drew up at the house in Dover Street.

A car arrived at the same time and honked impatiently and imperiously. Simpkins leapt from the taxi and said, “Pull out of the way, quick.” It did so. And as Lola descended and stood at the top of the area steps, she saw Fallaray go slowly up to the front door with rounded shoulders, as though he were Atlas with the weight of the world on his back. He was followed by a man whose step was light and eager.

V

It was George Lytham.

The editor of a new weekly called Reconstruction which had not as yet done more than take its place among all those elder brothers on the bookstalls which were suffering from a combination of hardening of the arteries and shrinkage of the exchequer, Lytham was a live wire, a man who could make mistakes, eat his own words, and having gone halfway up the wrong road, turn around without giving a curse for what other men would call dignity and retrace his steps at a run. Eton and Balliol, he had been a wet-bob, had a chest like a prize fighter and a forearm as hard as a cricket bat. The third son of old Lord Lockinge, he had sat in the House as member for one of those agricultural constituencies which are too dull and scattered to attract Radical propagandists and nearly always plump for Unionism. He had quickly made his mark. Punch drew him in rowing shorts after his maiden speech and the Northcliff press made a point of referring to him as Young Lochinvar. But he had chucked the House in disgust after two years of it, one year of enormous enthusiasm during which he had worked like a dog and another year of sickly pessimism and disillusion brought about by contact with a set of political crows who fluttered over the carcass of England,—traditionless, illiterate, dishonest, of low minds and low accents, led by the Old Bad Men who had inherited the right or tricked their way to the front benches and had all died before the War but were still living and still clinging to office. He owed allegiance to no leader and had started Reconstruction, backed with the money of the great mine owners and merchants who should have been members of the Cabinet, for the purpose of cleaning out the Augean stables. He numbered among his contributors every political free-thinker in England,—ex-members of Parliament, ex-war correspondents who spoke with horror of brass hats, and men who had served in all capacities in the War and were, for that reason, determined to remove the frightful burden of taxation caused by the maintenance of a great war machine for the indulgence of escapades in Mesopotamia and Ireland.

Lytham was young,—not yet thirty-five; unmarried, so that his purpose was single, his time his own. His paper was his wife and he was out for blood,—not with a bludgeon, not with a gun, but with an intellect which, supported by other intellects, alone provided some hope for the future of England and the Human Family. He had fastened upon Fallaray and dogged his heels. He regarded him as a brother, was ready to back him through thick and thin and had come home with him that night to discuss one or two of the great questions of the moment and to make plans for quick functioning.

When Fallaray led the way into his den and turned up the lights—all of them, so that there should be no shadows in the room and no ghosts—Lytham took his place with his back to the fire, standing in the frame of black oak like the picture of a crusader who had left his armor at home; he liked that room for its size and simplicity and tradition, its books and prints and unashamed early-Victorianism. He was as tall as Fallaray but not as thin and did not look as though the fires of his soul had burnt him down to the bone. His hair was brown and crisp and short, his moustache small, his nose straight and his eyes large and full of humor and irony. Except for his mouth there was nothing sensitive in his face and the only sign of restlessness that he permitted himself to show was in his habit of lighting one cigarette from the butt of another just finished,—the cheapest stinkers that were on the market and which had been smoked by the men of the regiment to which he had been attached from the beginning to the end of the War,—fags, in other words. His holder was far too long for the comfort of people who stood too close.

“Now, Fallaray,” he said, “let’s get down to it.”

Fallaray sat on the edge of his desk which he gripped tight with both his hands. “I’m ready,” he answered.

“The point is this. You have come out against reprisals, which means that you have dared to voice the overwhelming sentiment of the country at a moment when the Government has plumped for whole hoggism and given Sinn Fein its finest advertisement. So far so good. But this is only the beginning. To carry the thing on to its right conclusion, you must not only resign from the Cabinet but you must lead us to an immediate settlement of the Irish question. You must organize all that section of British opinion and American opinion—which counts for so much—and work for the overthrow of the coalition government. Will you do it?”

“Of course.”

“Ah!”

“But wait a second. Here we are marching with France into Germany, occupying towns for the purpose of wringing out of these whimpering liars the fruits of victory which they say they cannot pay and which they may not be able to pay. Already the fires of Bolshevism are breaking out everywhere as a result. Are we to put the Irish question before one that is surrounded with the most amazing threads of difficulty and may lead to the death of Europe? In other words, my dear Lytham, is murder and arson in one small island of greater importance to the world at this moment than the possibility of a new and even more terrible war in Europe, with disease and famine following at its heels? The men I have served with during the last war say ‘no.’ They have even gone so far as to dine here to-night with my wife to try and get her to move me out of what they call my rut,—to persuade me, because they have failed to do so, to shelve the Irish question and back up France in her perfectly righteous demand for reparations. I can’t make up my mind whether I will see this German question through, or swing body and soul to the Irish question and handicap them in this new crisis. If you’ve got anything to say, for God’s sake, say it.”

For a moment Lytham had nothing to say. It did seem to him, as he stood there in that quiet room with all its books and with hardly a sound coming in from the street below, that the troubles of that green and egotistical island melted away before those which did not affect merely England and France and Germany, Austria, Russia, Poland, Belgium but America also. It did seem to him that the murder of a few Britishers, a handful of loyal Irishmen and the reprisals of the Black and Tans for cowardly ambushes, brutally carried out, were in the nature of a side show in a circus of shows, of a small family quarrel in a city of families who were up against a frightful epidemic,—and he didn’t know what to say.

The two men looked into each other’s eyes, searched each other’s hearts and waited, listening, for an inspiration,—from God probably, whose children had become strangely out of hand.

Thus they stood, silent and without a sign, as others were standing,—bewildered, embarrassed, groping.

And then the door was flung open.

VI

Feo Fallaray’s ideas of evening clothes were curious. Her smock-frock, or wrapper, or whatever she called the thing, had a shimmer of green about it. Her stockings were green and she wore round her head a circlet of the most marvelous pieces of jade. The result was bizarre and made her look as though she were in fancy dress. She might have been an English Polaire ready to enter the smarter Bohemian circles of a London Montmartre. Or, to quote the remark of a woman in the opposite set, “a pre-Raphaelite flapper.”

She drew up short on seeing Lytham. He was no friend of hers. He was far too normal, far too earnest, and both his hands were on the wheel. But with all the audacity of which she was past mistress, she gave him one of her widest smiles. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “They told me some one was with my beloved husband. Well, how’s young Lochinvar?”

Lytham bowed profoundly and touched her hand with the tips of his fingers. “Very well, thank you,” he said. How he detested green. If he had been married and his wife had dared to appear in such a frock, he would have returned her to her mother for good.

Fallaray rose from the desk on which he was sitting and walked to the farthest end of the room. There was no one in the world who gave him such a sense of irritation as this woman did.

“I’m not welcome, I know,” said Feo, “but I thought you might like me to come and tell you what happened to-night, Arthur.”

Fallaray turned, but did not look at her. “Thanks so much,” he said. “Yes. You’re very kind. I’m afraid you’ve been pretty badly bored.”

She echoed the word, giving it all its dictionary interpretations and some which are certainly not in any dictionary.

“When I see those people,” she said, “I marvel at our ever having got through the War. Well, the end of it is that I am to ask you to reconsider your attitude. The argument is that your secession puts them into the cart just at a moment when they think, rightly or wrongly, that they are forcing the fear of God into the Sinn Feiners. They can’t imagine that my influence with you is absolutely nil, because they have the bourgeois idea of marriage and think that because two people are tied together by Church and law they must of necessity be in full sympathy. So all I can do is to make my report and add on my own account that I never saw such a set of petty opportunists in all my career.”

Lytham gave her a match for the cigarette that she had put into a black holder with a narrow band of diamonds. “Did you give them any views of your own?” he asked.

“Rather,” she said, the light on her hair like moonlight on black water. “I held forth at length with my back to the fireplace. As a matter of fact, quite on the spur of the moment, I handed them a very brilliant idea.”

“Yes?” It was a little incredulous.

“Yes, odd as it very obviously seems to you, Lochinvar. I said that I thought that this was the psychological moment for a nice piece of theatricality. I said that some one, probably Kipling, should draft a letter for the King, in which he should set forth the fact that he was going to withdraw every one of his soldiers and all his officials from Ireland at once and leave the Irish to run themselves, giving them the same kind of dominion government that they have in Australia and Canada, wishing them Godspeed and a happy Easter,—a manly, colloquial letter, very simple and direct, and ending with a touch of real emotion, the sort of thing that the King would write on his own, better than any one.”

There was a moment’s pause, during which Lytham darted a quick look at Fallaray. A gleam came into the eyes of both men.

“What did they say to that?” he asked.

“My dear man, what do you suppose they said? Having no imagination and precious little knowledge of the facts of the case, they dragged in Ulster and talked about civil war, which I think is absurd, because already, as Arthur knows perfectly well, Ulster is feeling the pinch of the boycott and has deserted Carson to a man. They’re longing for a settlement and only anxious to go on making bawbees in the good old Scotch Presbyterian manner.—They couldn’t see, and I don’t suppose they will ever be made to see, this lot, that a letter from the King would immediately have the effect of withdrawing all the sympathy from the Irish and reduce them from martyrs to the level of ordinary human beings. They couldn’t see that every Irish grievance would be taken away in one fell swoop, that the priests would be left without a leg to stand on and that above all America would be the first to say ‘Now show us.’ It would be a frightful blow to Collins and de Valera and also to the Germans and the Sinn Feiners in the United States, and make all the world admire the British sense of sportsmanship,—which we have almost lost by everything that has been done during and since the War by our people in Ireland.—What do you think of it,—both of you?”

She threw her head back and waited for a scoffing laugh from Lytham and a look from her husband that would move her to ribaldry. Her long white neck rose out of her queer gown like a pillar, the pieces of jade in her hair shimmered oddly and there was the gleam of undergraduate ragging in her eyes.

Fallaray looked at his wife for the first time. “It was an inspiration,” he said. “I confess that I have never thought of this solution.”

Feo was amazed but bowed ironically. “Very generous, Arthur, very generous. I couldn’t have been married to you all this time without having acquired a certain amount of intelligence, though, could I?” Even at such a moment she could not remain serious, although she was perfectly ready to confess to a considerable flutter of vanity at Fallaray’s favorable comment.

“My God,” said George Lytham, “it takes a woman to think of a thing like this.”

“You’ll make me swollen-headed in a moment, you two.”

Lytham took no further notice of her. He strode over to Fallaray. “Could this be done? I quite agree with your wife in her interpretation of the effect of such a letter and of course it could be made the sort of human document which would electrify the world. I agree, too, that once our soldiers were withdrawn with all the brass hats from the castle, the huge majority of reasonable Irishmen would insist on taking hold of things against the very small minority of Republicans who have merely used Ireland as a means of feathering their own nests, and be obliged to prove that they are fit to run their own country without bloody squabbles, cat-calling, filthy recriminations and all the other things for which they have earned a historical reputation. But—can it be done?”

Fallaray paced up and down the room with his hands clasped behind his back and his great shoulders rounded. Lytham and Lady Feo watched him. It was a peculiar moment. They both saw in it the test of Fallaray’s imagination and, in a way, humor. They could see that he was looking at this thing from every possible angle, dissecting it as a chemist would dissect bad water. At last he gave a groan and stopped and faced them.

“Not with these men,” he said. “Not with this political system, not in these times. Do you imagine for a moment that the present Cabinet holds a single man big enough, humble enough, patriotic enough to permit even the King to step on the stage and absorb the limelight? No. Not one. There is some microbe in the House of Commons, some atrocious cootie which gets under the skin of its members and poisons them so that they become the victims of a form of egomania of which they never can be cured. Then, too, my dear Lytham, we must get it into our heads that the Irish trouble is like a cancer in the body of the Constitution. We may hit upon a medicine that seems likely to give temporary relief—the withdrawal of the troops, the appointment of a new Lord Lieutenant, even the establishment of a Dominion Government—but we have got to remember that the hatred of the Irish for the English is fundamental and permanent. What may seem to us to-day to offer a solution to this age-old problem becomes futile and unworkable to-morrow. In our efforts to deal with the question we must not allow ourselves to be influenced by the quick transitory events that chase each other across the front pages of the paper. We must, if we can, go to the root of the malady,—the deep human emotion that burns in the hearts and souls of the Irish and endeavor to understand. Otherwise we are as children making foolish marks on shifting sand. What we write to-day is obliterated to-morrow.”

He turned about, walked slowly over to the chair at his desk and dropped into it heavily, rising again immediately because Feo was standing.

Seeing which, and having an engagement to join Mrs. Malwood and several others at a private dance club, she made for the door. “Well,” she said, “there it is. I did my best for you.”

“An excellent best,” said Fallaray. “Thank you again. Are you leaving us?”

She waved her hand, that long able hand which might have achieved good things but for that fatal kink in her,—and went.

“Brilliant woman,” said Fallaray. It was on the tip of Lytham’s tongue to say “Brilliant what?” but he swallowed the remark.

And presently they heard Feo’s high-pitched voice in the street below, giving an order to her chauffeur.

And they resumed the discussion, coming back always to the point from which they started. The Old Bad Man, shuffling, juggling, lying to others as well as themselves, without the sense to realize that something far worse than the War was coming hourly to a head, blocked every avenue of escape.

VII

Lytham walked home in the small hours of that morning. He had the luck to live in the Albany, at the Piccadilly end. The streets, but for a silent-footed Bobby or two, were deserted. Even the night birds had given up hope and withdrawn to their various nests.

He wondered once more, as he went along, what on earth had made Fallaray marry Feo, of all women. It was one of his favorite forms of mental pastime to try and discover the reason of ninety-nine per cent, of the marriages which had come under his fairly intimate observation. It seemed to him, in reviewing the whole body of his friends, not only that every man had married the wrong woman but that every woman had married the wrong man.

There was his brother, for instance,—Charlie Lytham, master of foxhounds and one of the most good-natured creatures to be found on earth,—hearty, honest, charitable, full of laughter, a superb horseman, everybody’s friend. For some unexplained and astounding reason he hadn’t married one of the nice healthy English girls who rode and golfed and stumped about the countryside, perfectly content to live out of town for ten months of the year and enjoy a brief bust in London. He had been dragged to the altar by a woman who looked like a turkey and gobbled like one when she spoke, who wore the most impossible clothes with waggling feathers and rattling beads, spoke in a loud raucous voice and was as great a form of irritation to every one who came in contact with her as the siren of a factory. What was the idea?—Poor devil. He had condemned himself to penal servitude.

Then there was his sister, Helena Lytham, a beautiful decorative person born to play the queen in pageants and stand about as in a fresco in a rather thick nightgown which clung decorously to her Leightonian figure,—respectable but airy. On Lytham’s return from Coblenz after the Armistice she had presented him to a little dapper person who barely came up to her shoulder, who smoked a perpetual cigar out of the corner of his mouth, wore a waistcoat with a linoleum pattern, skin-tight trousers and boots with brown leather uppers. He realized George’s idea of the riding master of a Margate livery stable. And so it went on all the way through.—And here was Fallaray.

The truth of the thing was that Fallaray had not married Lady Feo. Lady Feo had married Fallaray. What she had said to Mrs. Malwood was perfectly true. At eighteen her hobbies were profiles and tennis. At twenty-four Fallaray’s profile was at its best. He looked like a Greek god, especially when he was playing tennis with a shirt open at the neck, and she had met him during the year that he had put up that superb fight against Wilding in the good old days. The fact that he was Arthur Fallaray, the son of a distinguished father, born and bred for a place on the front bench, a marked man already because of his speeches in the Oxford Union, didn’t matter. His profile was the finest that she had seen and his tennis was in the championship class, and so she had deliberately gone for him, followed him from house party to house party with the sole intention of acquiring and possessing. At the end of six weeks she had got him. He had been obliged to kiss her. Her face had been purposely held in place to receive it. The rest was easy. Whereupon, she had immediately advertised the engagement broadcast, brought her relations down upon Fallaray in a swarm, sent paragraphs to the papers and made it literally impossible for the unfortunate man to do anything but go through with the damned thing like a gentleman,—dazed by the turn of events and totally unacquainted with the galloping creature who had seemed to him to resemble a thoroughbred but untrained yearling, kicking its heels about in a paddock. It had all been just a lark to her,—no more serious than collecting postage stamps, which eventually she could sell or give away. If ever she were to fall really in love, it would be perfectly simple, she had argued, either to be divorced or to juggle affairs so that she might divorce Fallaray. Any man who played tennis as well as he had done could do a little thing like that for her. The result was well known. A man of high ideals, Fallaray had gone through with this staggering marriage with every intention of making it work. Being in love with no other girl, he had determined to do his utmost to play the game and presently stand proudly among a little family of Fallarays. But he had found in Feo some one who had no standards, no sense of right and wrong, give and take; a girl who was a confirmed anarchist, who cared no more for law and order, Church and State or the fundamentals of life, tradition, honor, womanhood than an animal, a beautiful orang-outang, if there is such a thing, who or which delighted in hanging to branches by its tail and making weird grimaces at passers-by. The thing had been a tragedy, so far as Fallaray was concerned, an uncanny and terrible event in his life, almost in the nature of an incurable illness. The so-called honeymoon to which he never looked back, had been a nightmare filled with scoffing laughter, brilliant and amazing remarks, out of which he had emerged in a state of mental chaos to plunge into work as an antidote. They had always lived under the same roof because it was necessary for a man who goes into politics to truckle to that curious form of hypocrisy which will never be eradicated from the British system. Her people and his people had demanded this, and his first constituency had made it a sine qua non. Not requiring much money, he had been and continued to be very generous in his allowance to his wife, who did not possess a cent of her own. On the contrary, it was frequently necessary for her to settle her brother’s debts and even to pay her father’s bills from time to time. The gallant old Marquis was without anything so bourgeois as the money sense and couldn’t possibly play bridge under five pounds a thousand. There was also the system with which he had many times attempted to break the bank at Monte Carlo.

To-day, never interfering with her way of life and living in his own wing like a bachelor, he knew less of Feo’s character than he did when she had caught him first. What he knew of her friendships and her peregrinations he got from the newspapers. When it was necessary to dine at his own table, he treated her as though she were one of his guests, or rather as though he were one of hers. There was no scandal attaching to his name, because women played absolutely no part in his life; and there was no actual scandal attaching to hers. Only notoriety. She had come to be looked upon by society and by the vast middle class who discussed society as a beautiful freak, an audacious strange creature who frittered away her gifts, who was the leader of a set of women of all ages, married and unmarried, who took an impish delight in flouting the conventions and believed that they established the proof of unusual intelligence by a self-conscious display of eccentricity.

VIII

And in the meantime Lola continued to be an apt little pupil. Her quick ear had already enabled her to pick up the round crisp intonation of Lady Feo and her friends and at any moment of the day she could now give an exact imitation of their walk, manner of shaking hands and those characteristic tricks which made them different from all the women who had had the ill fortune to come into the world in the small streets.

Up in the servant’s bedroom in Dover Street, before a square of mirror, Lola practised and rehearsed for her eventual debut,—the form of which was on the knees of the gods. She had entered her term of apprenticeship quite prepared to serve conscientiously for at least a year,—a long probation for one so young and eager. Probably she would have continued to study and listen and watch, with gathering impatience, but for a sudden hurrying forward of the clock brought about by the gift of a frock,—rustling with silk. A failure, because the dressmaker, with the ineffable cheek of these people, had entirely departed from Feo’s rigid requirements, it provided Lola with the key to life. Giving one yell at the sight of it, Feo was just about to rip it in pieces when she caught the longing eyes of her maid. Whereupon, with the generosity which is so easy when it is done with other people’s money, she said, “Coming over,” rolled it into a ball and threw it at Lola. It was, as may be imagined, a very charming and reasonable garment such as might have been worn by a perfectly respectable person.

On her way home that night, Lola dropped in to her own little dressmaker who lived in one of the numerous dismal villas off Queen’s Road, for the purpose of having it altered to fit her. It was miles too large. She had eventually brought it back to Dover Street and hidden it away behind one of her day frocks in her only cupboard, and every time that she took a peep at it, her eyes sparkled and her breath came short and she wondered when and how she could possibly wear it.

Filled with a great longing to try her wings and fly out of the cage like the canary of which she had spoken to Ernest Treadwell, there were moments in her life now when she was consumed with impatience. The poet of the public library, the illiterate and ecstatic valet, the pompous butler and the two cockney footmen,—she had grown beyond all these. She was absolutely sure of herself as an honorary member of the Feo “gang.” She felt that she could hold her own now with the men of their class. If she were right, her apprenticeship would be over. Fully fledged, she could proceed with her great scheme. The chance came as chances always do come, and as usual she took it.

Several days after Lytham’s talk with Fallaray—which had left them both in that state of irresolution which seemed to have infected every one—Lady Feo went off for the week-end, leaving Lola behind. The party had been arranged on the spur of the moment and was to take place in a cottage with a limited number of bedrooms. If Lady Feo had given the thing a moment’s thought, she would have told Lola to take three days holiday. But this she had forgotten to do. And so there was Lola in Dover Street with idle hands. The devil finds some mischief still——

At four o’clock that evening Simpkins entered the servants’ sitting room. Lola happened to be alone, surrounded by Tatlers, Punches and Bystanders, fretting a little and longing to try her paces. “Good old,” he said, “Mr. Fallaray has got to dine at the Savoy to-night with his Ma and Auntie from the country. One of them family affairs which, not coming too frequently, does him good. And you’re free. How about another show, Princess?” He had recently taken to calling her princess. “There’s another American play on which ain’t bad, I hear. Let’s sample it. What do you say?”

Mr. Fallaray.—The Savoy——

Without giving the matter an instant’s thought, Lola shook her head. “Too bad, Simpky,” she said, “I promised Mother to go home to-night. She has some friends coming and I am going to help her.”

“Oh,” said Simpkins, extremely disappointed. “Well, then, I’ll take you ’ome and if I’m very good and put on a new tie I may be asked,—I say I may——” He paused, having dropped what he considered to be a delicate hint.

This was a most awkward moment. Mr. Fallaray—The Savoy—That new frock. And here was Simpkins butting in and standing with his head craned forward as if to meet the invitation halfway. So she said, as cool as a cucumber, “Mother will be very disappointed not to be able to ask you, Simpky, because she likes you so much. She enjoyed both times you came home with me. So did Father. But, you see, our drawing-room is very small and Mother has asked too many people as it is. Get tickets for tomorrow night and I shall be very glad to go with you.”

There was no guile in Lola’s eye and not the smallest hesitation in her speech. Simpkins bore up bravely. He knew these parties and the way in which some hostesses allowed their rooms to brim over. And, anyway, it was much better to have Lola all to himself. He could live for Saturday. “Righto,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready to go and if you feel like a taxicab——”

“I couldn’t think of it,” said Lola. “You spend much too much money, Simpky. You’re an absolute profiteer. I shall go by Tube and this time a friend of mine is fetching me.”

“Treadwell?” She nodded and calmly examined a picture of Lopodoski in one of her latest contortions.

There was a black cloud on Simpkins’s face. He had met Ernest at the Breezys’ house. He had seen the way in which this boy gazed at Lola,—lanky, uncouth, socialistic young cub. He was not jealous, good Lord, no. That would be absurd. A junior librarian with a salary that was far less than any plumber got, and him a man of means with the “Black Bull” at Wargrave on the horizon. All the same, if he heard that Ernest Treadwell had suddenly been run over by a pantechnicon and flattened out like a frog——

And that was why he sat down on the sofa a little too close to Lola and dared to possess himself of her hand. “Princess,—you know ’ow I feel. You know what you’ve done to me.”

Lola patted his hand and gave it back and rewarded him with a smile which she considered to be matronly. “Nice Simpky,” she said. “Very nice Simpky,” as though he were a rather faulty terrier a little too keen on the thrown stick. “I must go now,” she added and rose. “I have some sewing to do for Lady Feo.”

And as Simpkins watched her go, his whole heart swelled, and something went to his head that blurred everything for a moment. He would sell his soul for that girl. For her sake he would even set light to the “Black Bull” and watch it burn, if that would give her a moment’s amusement.

Mr. Fallaray.—The Savoy——

What Lola did in Lady Feo’s room was not to sew but to seat herself at the dressing table, do her hair with the greatest care and practise with the make-up sticks,—rouge, and the brush of water colors with which she emphasized her eyebrows. Finally, time having flown, she borrowed a pair of lace stockings, some shoes and gloves, made her way stealthily along the servants’ corridor to her own room, and packed them, with the new frock, into a cardboard box. Dressed and hatted for the street, she carried the magic costume in which she was going to transplant herself from Cinderella’s kitchen to the palace of the Prince and went down to the servants’ sitting room through which it was necessary for her to go in order to escape.

Miss Breezy was there, issuing, as she would have said, orders to one of the housemaids. That was lucky. It saved Lola from answering an outburst of questions. As it was, she gave a little bow to her aunt, said “Good evening, Miss Breezy,” opened the door and nipped up the area steps into the street. A little involuntary laugh floated behind her like the petals of a rose. A prowling taxi caught her eye. She nodded and was in before any one could say Jack Robinson,—if any one now remembers the name of that mystic early Victorian.

The address she gave was 22 Castleton Terrace, Bayswater.

Mr. Fallaray.—The Savoy!

IX

“My word,” said Mrs. Rumbold, getting up from her knees and taking a pin out of her mouth. “I never see anything like it before. It’s my opinion that you could ’old your own in that frock with any of the best, my dear. It’s so quiet—yet so compelling. The best of taste. If I see you coming down the steps of the Ritz, I should nudge the person I was with and say, ‘Duke’s daughter. French mother probably.’”

“Thank you,” said Lola. And that was exactly how she felt. Carried forward on the current of her impatience, she didn’t stop to ask herself what was the use of going to the Savoy, of all places, alone,—the danger, the absurdity. “I wonder if you’ll be so kind as to fold up my day dress, put it in the box and string it up. You’re sure you’ll be up as late as half-past eleven? If so, it won’t take me a moment to change and I’ll leave the evening dress here.”

“Oh, that’ll be all right,” said Mrs. Rumbold. “I shall be up, my dear. The old man’s going to a dinner and will come staggering back later than that. He’ll be a regular Mason to-night, bless him.” And she stood back, looked Lola all over with the greatest admiration and a certain amount of personal pride. She was a good dressmaker, no doubt about it. An awful lot of stuff had had to be taken out of that frock. It must have been made for a woman with the shoulders of a rowing man. It wasn’t for her to ask what the little game was, to inquire why a lady’s maid was going out on the sly, looking like her mistress. She had her living to make and dressmaking was a precarious livelihood in these times. “Have a good evening, my dear,” she said; “enjoy yourself. Only live once, yer know.” And added inwardly, “And I’ll lay you’ll manage to do yourself pretty well,—a lot better than most, with that face and figure and the style and all. Lord, but how you’ve come on since I see yer last. All the zwar-zwar of the reg’ler thing, sweep-me-bob.”

The taxi was still waiting at the door, ticking up sixpences, but in Lola’s pocket was a little purse bulging with her savings. She turned at the door. “Mrs. Rumbold,” she said, and it might have been Lady Feo who was speaking, “you certainly are one in a million.”

There was a sudden cry of despair.

“Lord ’a’ mercy, what’s the trouble?”

Lola had become herself again, a tragic, large-eyed self. “I can’t go like this,” she said. “I have no evening cloak.” The whole framework of her adventure flapped like the sides of a tent in a high wind.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. Rumbold. “Well, there’s a nice lookout. What in the world’s to be done?”

Fallaray.—The Savoy——

“Wait a second. I’ve got an idea.” The woman with tousled hair made a dart at a curtain which was stretched across one of the corners of her workroom. She emerged immediately with something thin and black which gleamed here and there with silver. “Put that on,” she said. “I’ve just made it for Mrs. Wimpole in Inverness Terrace. She won’t be calling for it until to-morrer. If you’ll promise to bring it back safe——”

All Lola’s confidence returned and a smile of triumph came into her face. “That will do nicely,” she said, and placed herself to receive the borrowed garment. A quick glance in the mirror showed her that if it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing that she would have chosen, it passed.

“You’re a brick, Mrs. Rumbold, a perfect brick. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.” And she bent forward and touched the withered cheek with her lips. One of these days she would do something for this hard-working woman whose eldest boy sat legless in the back parlor,—something which would relieve the great and persistent strain which followed her from one plucky day to another.

And then, pausing for a moment on the top of the steps in order to make sure that there was no one in the street who could recognize her—Queen’s Road was only just round the corner—Lola ran down and put her hand on the door of the taxi cab.

“The Savoy,” she said.