t
was empty.

"The luck must turn sometime," he reminded her soothingly. "How long
will you be changing?"

"I am tired," she confessed. "I thought that to-night I would not dine.
I will have something sent up to my room."

He was obviously disappointed.

"Couldn't you dine as you are?" he begged. "You could change later, if
you wished to. It is always such a disappointment when you do not
appear--and to-night," he added, "especially."

Violet hesitated. She was really longing only to be alone and to rest.
She thought, however, of the poor invalid to whom their meeting at
dinner-time was the one break of the day.

"Very well," she promised, "I will be down in ten minutes."

Draconmeyer, as the lift bore her upwards, strolled away. Although the
custom was a strange one to him, he sought out the American bar and
drank a cocktail. Then he lit a cigarette and made his way back into the
lounge, moving restlessly about, his hands behind his back, his forehead
knitted. In his way he had been a great schemer, and in the crowded hall
of the hotel that night, surrounded by a wonderfully cosmopolitan throng
of loungers and passers-by, he lived again through the birth and
development of many of the schemes which his brain had conceived since
he had left his mother-country. One and all they had been successful. He
seemed, indeed, to have been imbued with the gift of success. He had
floated immense loans where other men had failed; he had sustained the
credit of his country on a high level through more than one serious
financial crisis; he had pulled down or built up as his judgment or
fancy had dictated; and all the time the man's relaxations, apart from
the actual trend of great affairs, had been few and slight. Then had
come his acquaintance with Linda's school-friend. He looked back through
the years. At first he had scarcely noticed her visits. Gradually he had
become conscious of a dim feeling of thankfulness to the woman who
always seemed able to soothe his invalid wife. Then, scarcely more than
a year or so ago, he had found himself watching her at unexpected
moments, admiring the soft grace of her movements, the pleasant cadence
of her voice, the turn of her head, the colour of her hair, the elegance
of her clothes, her thin, fashionable figure. Gradually he had begun to
look for her, to welcome her at his table--and from that, the rest.
Finally the birth of this last scheme of his. He had very nearly made a
fatal mi