ed, and who made one of a gay group at a
flower-smothered table.

And she rose and laughingly acknowledged the plaudits; but they wouldn't
let her alone until she mounted her chair and sang it in solo for them;
and then the vast salon went wild.

Neville, surveying the vicinity, recognised people he never dreamed
would have appeared in such a place--here a celebrated architect and his
pretty wife entertaining a jolly party, there a well-known lawyer and
somebody else's pretty wife; and there were men well known at
fashionable clubs and women known in fashionable sets, and men and women
characteristic of quieter sets, plainly a little uncertain and surprised
to find themselves there. And he recognised assorted lights of the
"profession," masculine and feminine; and one or two beautiful meteors
that were falling athwart the underworld, leaving fading trails of
incandescence in their jewelled wake.

The noise began to stun him; he laughed and talked and sang with the
others, distinguishing neither his own voice nor the replies. For the
tumult grew as the hour advanced toward midnight, gathering steadily in
strength, in license, in abandon.

And now, as the minute hands on the big gilded clock twitched nearer and
nearer to midnight, the racket became terrific, swelling, roaring into
an infernal din as the raucous blast of horns increased in the streets
outside and the whistles began to sound over the city from Westchester
to the Bay, from Long Island to the Palisades.

Sheer noise, stupefying, abominable, incredible, unending, greeted the
birth of the New Year; they were dancing in circles, singing, cheering
amid the crash of glasses. Table-cloths, silken gowns, flowers were
crushed and trampled under foot; flushed faces looked into strange
faces, laughing; eyes strange to other eyes smiled; strange hands
exchanged clasps with hands unknown; the whirl had become a madness.

And, suddenly, in its vortex, Neville saw Valerie West. Somebody had set
her on a table amid the silver and flowers and splintered crystal. Her
face was flushed, eyes and mouth brilliant, her gown almost torn from
her left shoulder and fluttering around the lovely arm in wisps and rags
of silk and lace. Querida supported her there.

They pelted her with flowers and confetti, and she threw roses back at
everybody, snatching her ammunition from a great basket which Querida
held for her.

Ogilvy and Annan saw her and opened fire on her with a cheer