uiet elegance; no other woman so faultless in the smaller
details of her toilette and person. Hunterleys watched with
expressionless face but with anger growing in his heart, as he saw
Draconmeyer bending towards her, accepting her suggestions about the
dinner, laughing when she laughed, watching almost humbly for her
pleasure or displeasure. It was a cursed mischance which had brought him
to Monte Carlo!

Hunterleys hurried over his dinner, and without even going to his room
for a hat or coat, walked across the square in the soft twilight of an
unusually warm February evening and took a table outside the Cafe de
Paris, where he ordered coffee. Around him was a far more cosmopolitan
crowd, increasing every moment in volume. Every language was being
spoken, mostly German. As a rule, such a gathering of people was, in its
way, interesting to Hunterleys. To-night his thoughts were truant. He
forgot his strenuous life of the last three months, the dangers and
discomforts through which he had passed, the curious sequence of events
which had brought him, full of anticipation, nerved for a crisis, to
Monte Carlo of all places in the world. He forgot that he was in the
midst of great events, himself likely to take a hand in them. His
thoughts took, rarely enough for him, a purely personal and sentimental
turn. He thought of the earliest days of his marriage, when he and his
wife had wandered about the gardens of his old home in Wiltshire on
spring evenings such as these, and had talked sometimes lightly,
sometimes seriously, of the future. Almost as he sat there in the midst
of that noisy crowd, he could catch the faint perfume of hyacinths from
the borders along which they had passed and the trimly-cut flower-beds
which fringed the deep green lawn. Almost he could hear the chiming of
the old stable clock, the clear note of a thrush singing. A puff of wind
brought them a waft of fainter odour from the wild violets which
carpeted the woods. Then the darkness crept around them, a star came
out. Hand in hand they turned towards the house and into the library,
where a wood fire was burning on the grate. His thoughts travelled on. A
wave of tenderness had assailed him. Then he was awakened by the
waiter's voice at his elbow.

"Le cafe, monsieur."

He sat up in his chair. His dreaming moments were few and this one had
passed. He set his heel upon that tide of weakening memories, sipped his
coffee and looked out upon the crowd. Thr