ng the pearls he had given her. No doubt
she had merely forgotten at the last moment to put them on. She was
continually forgetting them and leaving them about. But this negligent
woman was the organiser in chief of the great soiree! Well, if it had
succeeded, she was lucky.

"I must run off," said she, starting up, busy, proud, falsely calm, the
general of a victorious army as the battle draws to a close. She
embraced him again, and he actually felt comforted.... She was gone.

"As I grow older," he reflected, "I'm hanged if I don't understand life
less and less."

* * * * *

He was listening to the distant rhythm of the music when he mistily
comprehended that there was no music and that the sounds in his ear were
not musical. He could not believe that he had been asleep and had
awakened, but the facts were soon too much for his delusion and he said
with the air of a discoverer: "I've been asleep," and turned on the
light.

There were voices and footsteps in the corridors or on the
landing,--whispers, loud and yet indistinct talking, tones indicating
that the speakers were excited, if not frightened, and that their
thoughts had been violently wrenched away from the pursuit of pleasure.
His watch showed two o'clock. The party was over, the last automobile
had departed, and probably even the tireless Eliza Fiddle was asleep in
her new home. Next Mr. Prohack noticed that the door of his room was
ajar.

He had no anxiety. Rather he felt quite gay and careless,--the more so
as he had wakened up with the false sensation of complete refreshment
produced by short, heavy slumber. He thought:

"Whatever has happened, I have had and shall have nothing to do with it,
and they must deal with the consequences themselves as best they can."
And as a measure of precaution against being compromised, he switched
off the light. He heard Eve's voice, surprisingly near his door:

"I simply daren't tell him! No, I daren't!"

The voice was considerably agitated, but he smiled maliciously to
himself, thinking:

"It can't be anything very awful, because she only talks in that strain
when it's nothing at all. She loves to pretend she's afraid of me. And
moreover I don't believe there's anything on earth she daren't tell me."

He heard another voice, reasoning in reply, that resembled Mimi's.
Hadn't that girl gone home yet? And he heard Sissie's voice and
Charlie's. But for him all these were inarticul