aurant
dinner-party for that night. The Duchess of Castleford has kindly
offered to act as hostess for me, and we are all going on to the Gaiety
afterwards."

"Delightful!" Lady Maxwell exclaimed. "I should love to come."

Bernadine bowed.

"You have, then, dear lady, fulfilled your destiny," he said. "You have
given secret information to a foreign person of mysterious identity, and
accepted payment."

Now Bernadine was a man of easy manners and unruffled composure. To the
natural _insouciance_ of his aristocratic bringing-up he had added the
steely reserve of a man moving in the large world, engaged more often
than not in some hazardous enterprise. Yet, for once in his life, and in
the midst of the idlest of conversations, he gave himself away so
utterly that even this woman with whom he was lunching--a very butterfly
lady indeed--could not fail to perceive it. She looked at him in
something like astonishment. Without the slightest warning his face had
become set in a rigid stare, his eyes were filled with the expression of
a man who sees into another world. The healthy colour faded from his
cheeks; he was white even to the parted lips; the wine dripped from his
raised glass on to the tablecloth.

"Why, whatever is the matter with you?" she demanded. "Is it a ghost
that you see?"

Bernadine's effort was superb, but he was too clever to deny the shock.

"A ghost indeed," he answered, "the ghost of a man whom every newspaper
in Europe has declared to be dead."

Her eyes followed his. The two people who were being ushered to a seat
in their immediate vicinity were certainly of somewhat unusual
appearance. The man was tall and thin as a lath, and he wore the clothes
of the fashionable world without awkwardness, and yet with the air of
one who was wholly unaccustomed to them. His cheek-bones were remarkably
high, and receded so quickly towards his pointed chin that his cheeks
were little more than hollows. His eyes were dry and burning, flashing
here and there, as though the man himself were continually oppressed by
some furtive fear. His thick black hair was short-cropped, his forehead
high and intellectual. He was a strange figure indeed in such a
gathering, and his companion only served to accentuate the anachronisms
of his appearance. She was, above all things, a woman of the
moment--fair, almost florid, a little thick-set, with tightly laced yet
passable figure. Her eyes were blue, her hair light-coloured. Sh