ariously, cups of tea, ginger
beer, stale buns and ices. Hyde Park they had viewed from the top of a
motor bus and descending from this chariot at London Bridge had caught
the train home. In the train Flamby had fallen asleep, utterly exhausted
with such a saturnalia, and her parents had eaten sandwiches and
partaken of beer from a large bottle which Mrs. Duveen had brought in a
sort of carpet-bag. Flamby remembered that she had been aroused from her
slumbers by her father, who conceiving a sudden and violent antipathy
against both bag and bottle (the latter being empty) had opened the
carriage window and hurled them both out on to the line.

It was an odd memory but it brought a cloud of sadness, and Don, quick
to detect the shadow, hurried Flamby off to the Coliseum and astounded
her by booking a stage box. The Aunt was consulted over the telephone,
the Aunt agreed to join the party in the evening, and during the
remainder of that eventful afternoon there were all sorts of wonderful
sights to be seen; delightful shops unlike any that Flamby had imagined,
and an exhibition of water-colours in Bond Street which fired her
ambition like a torch set to dry bracken, as Don had designed that it
should do. They had tea at a fashionable tea-shop, and Don noted that
even within the space of twenty-four hours the number of lovely women
had perceptibly diminished. This historic day concluded, then, with
dinner at the Carlton and Ellen Terry at the Coliseum. How otherwise an
excellent programme was constituted mattered not, but when the red-robed
Portia came finally before the curtain and bestowed one of her sweet
smiles exclusively upon the enraptured girl, Flamby found that two big
tears were trickling down her hot cheeks.

V

And now another figure in the pageant which Iamblichos called "the
indissoluble bonds of Necessity" was about to reappear in his appointed
place in response to the call of the unseen Prompter. Hideous are the
settings of that pageant to-day; for where in the glowing pages of Dumas
we see D'Artagnan, the gallant Forty-five and many another good friend
riding in through the romantic gates of Old Paris, the modern historian
finds himself concerned with railway stations which have supplanted
those gates of Paris and of London alike. Thus Don entered by the gate
of St. Pancras, Flamby by the smoky portal of London Bridge; and, on the
following morning, Yvonne Mario stood upon a platform at Victoria
awaitin