he ceiling.

"What time does this Hadley-Owen party break up?"

"Not till daylight. It's the last big fixture of the social season,
and ordinarily they keep it up till sunrise."

"It'll be still going, then?"

"Strong. They'll be in full swing, now, of after-supper dancing."

"That settles it: I'm going."

The boy lifted on his elbow in amaze, then subsided with a grunt of
pain.

"_You're_ going?"

"You say you've got a costume of some sort here? I'll borrow it. We're
much of a size."

"Heaven knows you're welcome, but--"

"But what?"

"You have no invitation."

Rising, P. Sybarite smiled loftily. "Don't worry about that. If I
can't bribe my way past a cordon of mercenary foreign waiters--and
talk down any other opposition--I'm neither as flush as I think nor as
Irish."

"But what under the sun do you want there?"

"To see what's doing--find out for myself what devilment Brian
Shaynon's hatching. Maybe I'll do no good--and maybe I'll be able to
put a spoke in his wheel. To do that--once--_right_--I'd be willing to
die as poor as I've lived till this blessed night!"

He paused an instant on the threshold of his cousin's bedroom; turned
back a sombre visage.

"I've little love for Brian Shaynon, myself, or none. You know what he
did to me--and mine."

XVI

BEELZEBUB

Late enough in all conscience was the last guest to arrive for the
Hadley-Owen masquerade.

Already town-cars, carriages, and private 'busses were being called
for and departing with their share of the more seasoned and
sober-sided revellers, to whom bed and appetite for breakfast had come
to mean more than a chance to romp through a cotillion by the light of
the rising sun--to say discreetly little or nothing of those other
conveyances which had borne away _their_ due proportion of far less
sage and by no means sober-sided ones, who yet retained sufficient
sense of the fitness of things to realise that bed followed by
matutinal bromides would be better for them than further dalliance
with the effervescent and evanescent spirits of festivity.

More and more frequently the elevators, empty but for their
attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the
Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of
gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly
attired--prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid,
and mountebank: all weary yet reluctant in their going.

And at this