no
warning. Some other hand must write "Mene Thekel Phares" on the wall of
her palace of pleasure and success.

Edmund Grosse declined the task.

Molly danced on in the long gallery between its walls of mirrors and
their infinite repetitions of twinkling candles and dancing figures
pleasantly confused to the eye by the delicate wreaths of gold foliage
that divided their panes. In the immeasurable depths of those
reflections the nearest objects melted by endless repetition into dim
distances, and the present dancing figures might seem to melt into a far
past where men and women were dancing also.

Gallery within gallery in that mirrored world, with very little effort
of imagination, might become peopled by different generations. As the
figures receded in space so they receded in time. Groups of human
beings, with all the subtle ease of a decadent civilisation, ceded their
place to groups of men and women who moved with more slowness and
dignity in the middle distance of those endless reflections. And looking
down those avenues of gilded foliage into that fancied past, the old cry
might well rise to the lips: "What shadows we are, and what shadows we
pursue!"

But, whether in the foreground of to-day, or in the secrets that the
mirrors held of a century before, or in the indistinguishable mist of
their greatest depths, wherever the imagination roamed, it found in
every group of human beings a woman who was young and beautiful, and yet
it could come back to the dancing figure of Molly without any shock of
disappointment or disdain.

"But it is daylight!" cried two young men who paused breathless with
their partners by the high narrow windows, at the end of the gallery,
and they threw back the shutters. The growing dawn mingled with the
lights of the decreasing candles, with the infinite repetitions of the
mirror, with the soft music of the last valse.

And Molly bore the light perfectly, as the chorus of praise and thanks
and "good-nights" of the late stayers echoed round her.

"Not 'good-night' but 'good-bye,'" said a very young girl, looking up at
Molly with facile tears rising in her blue eyes. "We go away to-morrow,
and this perfect night is the last!"

CHAPTER XXXVII

MARK ENTERS INTO TEMPTATION

The more he realised Molly's danger, the more he believed in her
innocence--the more anxious Edmund became to find a suitable envoy to
approach her from the enemy's side, and one who, if possible, wo