t a new cigarette and strolled out of the yard.

From the corner of his eye he saw Marigny's helper looking at
him. Without undue exaggeration, he craned his neck, rounded his
shoulders, and carried himself with the listless air of a Piccadilly
idler. He reflected, too, that a bare-headed man in evening dress
would not readily be identified with a leather-coated chauffeur, and
Dale, he hoped, was sufficiently endowed with mother wit to frame a
story plausible enough to account for his unforeseen appearance. On
the whole, the position was not so bad as it seemed in that first
moment when the owner of the 59 Du Vallon was revealed in the handsome
Count. In any event, what did it matter if his harmless subterfuge
were revealed? The girl would surely laugh, while Mrs. Devar would
squirm. So now for a turn along the front, and then to bed.

It was a perfect June evening, the fitting sequel to a day of unbroken
sunshine. A marvelous amber light hovered beyond the level line of the
sea to the west; an exquisite blue suffused the horizon from south to
east, deepening from sapphire to ultramarine as it blended with the
soft shadows of a summer's night. He found himself comparing the sky's
southeasterly tint with the azure depths of Cynthia Vanrenen's eyes,
but he shook off that fantasy quickly, crossed the roadway and
promenade, and, propping himself against the railings, turned a
resolute back on romance. He did not gain a great deal by this
maneuver, since his next active thought was centered in a species of
quest for the particular window among all those storeyed rows through
which Cynthia Vanrenen might even then be gazing at the shining
ocean.

He looked at his watch. Half-past nine.

"I am behaving like a blithering idiot," he told himself. "Miss
Vanrenen and her friends are either on the pier listening to the band,
or sitting over their coffee in the glass cage behind there. I'll wire
Simmonds in the morning to hurry up."

A man descended the steps of the hotel and walked straight across
King's Road. A light gray overcoat, thrown wide on his shoulders, gave
a lavish display of frilled shirt, and a gray Homburg hat was set
rakishly on one side of his head. In the half light Medenham at once
discerned the regular, waxen-skinned features of Count Marigny, and
during the next few seconds it really seemed as if the Frenchman were
making directly for him. But another man, short, rotund, very erect of
figure, and strutting