ling a bar or two of
"Gigolette" he poured out two glasses of a pale straw-coloured liquid,
then with the shaker poised over a third glass looked inquiringly at
Esther.

"What about you?" he invited.

Esther hesitated and succumbed to the temptation. After all, why not?

"As a resident of a dry country," she said, smiling, "I can't refuse."

He filled the glass and handed it to her just as Jacques entered,
bearing the hot and savoury _omelette aux champignons_.

"Well!"--and Captain Holliday raised his glass and his left eyebrow
simultaneously with easy nonchalance, "may we all get what we want!"

"Hear, hear," murmured the doctor mechanically, and drank his cocktail
at a gulp.

Esther sipped hers, finding it a subtle and delicious concoction.
Later she decided it was a potent one as well. Soon she observed that
a hint of unwonted animation crept into the doctor's manner and indeed
as the meal progressed he became almost gay, though how much of the
change was due to the cocktail and how much to the company she could
not tell. Moreover he ate steadily and voraciously. She thought she
had never seen a man eat so much, it was like stoking an engine.
Holliday, on the contrary, had little appetite for the excellent meal
and seemed strung up with a kind of nervous excitement.

Afterwards this scene recurred to her more than once, showing to her
imagination like a close-up on the screen. In the light of subsequent
happenings it held for her a curious fascination. She could at any
time shut her eyes and see the three of them, so ill-assorted, sitting
around the table in that bourgeois dining-room, eating and conversing,
herself one of the party by accident and virtually ignored by the other
two, yet linked with them in a sort of casual camaraderie that was
somehow established when she accepted the cocktail. Out of all that
followed, no incident remained for her so sinister and at the same time
so paradoxically trivial and absurd as this chance gathering at
_dejeuner_.

CHAPTER VI

One bright afternoon about ten days after this the Rolls Royce of the
Cliffords drew up at the doctor's door, and when the sandy-haired
chauffeur had descended and rung the bell, there emerged from the car
in somewhat ceremonial order Lady Clifford, her sister-in-law, and Sir
Charles himself. To the casual eye it would appear that the first of
these three could have no possible connection with the other two, any
more than a