ous beauty and
harlequin gown, struck a note which it lacked, struck two of them, the
go-and-be-hanged-to-you and originality.

In evening clothes that said Savile Row, Paliser approached. "You are
punctual as a comet and equally luminous."

Cassy, ignoring the remark, ignoring, too, the hand that accompanied it,
cut him short. "Haven't seen Madame Tamburini, have you?"

Paliser's hair had the effect of a mirror. He smoothed the back of it.
The ex-diva he had certainly seen and not later than just before she
telephoned to Cassy. But it is injudicious, and also tiresome, to tell
everything. With the wave of a cheque, the complicity of the former
first-lady had been assured, and assured moreover without a qualm on her
part. Ma Tamby did not know what it is to have a qualm--which she could
not have spelled if she had known. She was differently and superiorly
educated. In the university that life is, she had acquired encyclopedias
of recondite learning. She knew that ice is not all that it is cracked
up to be: that a finger in the pie is better than two in the fire, and
that angels have been observed elsewhere than at Mons--learning which,
as you may see, is surprising.

Over the ham and eggs of an earlier evening, the syllables of Paliser's
name had awakened echoes of old Academy nights and Mapleson's "grand
revivals" of the Trovatore, echoes thin and quavering, yet still
repeating hymns in glory of the man's angelic papa. On the way from ham
and eggs to Harlem, she had, in consequence, conjured, for Cassy's
benefit, with performing fleas. But when, on this afternoon, M. P. Jr.,
had come and waved cheques at her, she had felt that her worst hopes
were realised, that her finger was really in the pie, and she had agreed
to everything, which, however, for the moment, was nothing at all,
merely to abandon Cassy that evening; merely also to collaborate later
in the evocation of a myth, and meanwhile to keep at it with the fleas.

Now, in the hall of the Splendor, as Paliser patted the back of his
head, he was enjoying Cassy's open-air appearance that needed only a
tennis-racket to be complete.

Cassy glanced about. She had a penny or two more than her carfare and
yet, if she had owned the shop, she could not have appeared more at ease
in this smartest of smart inns, a part of which, destiny, in its
capriciousness, was to offer her.

"No," he answered. "But I have a private room somewhere. She can find
her way there, unl