Druro. But she was very late in arriving
at the "Falcon," where she was to be a passenger in Tryon's car.

At the last, it was a matter of ordering something at the chemist's for
her father and sending off a telegram that detained her, and she did
not reach the hotel until nearly a quarter to nine. Long before she
got there, she saw that all the cars were gone except one which she
easily recognized as Tryon's.

"Dear old Dick! He is always to be relied on," she said, and had a
half-finished thought that she would rather be with him that night than
any one, except----

Then she went quickly into the lounge, where, no doubt, he would be
waiting, and found him indeed, but sitting around a little table with
coffee and liqueurs in the company of Druro and Mrs. Hading, the latter
looking none too pleased.

"Ah," said she, with acerbity, as Gay came in, "at last! We were
beginning to think you were never coming."

"But why did you wait for me?" inquired Gay, politely bewildered. "I
thought Dick----"

"Some idiot has walked off with my car," explained Druro. "So Tryon is
taking us all."

"And we are waiting for petrol as well as you," smiled Tryon; "so sit
down." He put a chair for her next to Mrs. Hading, but that lady,
after a swift glance into a mirror on the wall, skilfully manoeuvred
her seat until she was opposite instead of next to the girl. Gay, in a
little white frock of soft mull, with a cascade of lace falling below
her long, young throat, resembled a freshly-gathered rose with all the
fragrance and dewiness of the garden of Youth upon her. When Marice
looked at her, she felt like a Borgia. She would have liked to press a
cup of poison to the girl's curved red lips and force her to drink. In
that glimpse in the mirror, she had seen that her own face, above a
delicate shroudy scarf with long flying ends, rose like some tired
hothouse orchid, beautiful still, but fading, paling, passing; and she
hated Gay's youth and freshness with a poignant hatred that was like
the piercing of a stiletto. She wondered why she had been such a fool
as to wear that gown of purplish amethystine tulle tonight. It was a
colour that made her face look hard and artificially tinted. True, her
bare neck and shoulders, which were of a perfection rarely seen outside
of an art gallery, showed at their best through the mazy shroudings,
and her throat looked as if it had been modelled by some cunning
Italian hand and sculptur