agoda.

'How much?' demanded the stranger.

'The bedrooms are twenty-five shillings, and the sitting-room two
guineas.'

'I guess Mr. Pank won't mind that. Hullo, Pank, you're here! I'm
through. Your number's 102 or 120, which you fancy. Just going to the
'phone a minute, and then I'll join you upstairs.'

Mr. Pank was a younger man, possessing a thin, astute, intellectual
face. He walked into the hall with noticeable deliberation. His
travelling costume was faultless, but from beneath his straw hat his
black hair sprouted in a somewhat peculiar fashion over his broad
forehead. He smiled lazily and shrewdly, and without a word disappeared
into a lift. Two large portmanteaus accompanied him.

Presently the elder stranger could be heard battling with the obstinate
idiosyncrasies of a London telephone.

'You haven't registered,' Nina called to him in her tremulous,
delicate, captivating voice, as he came out of the telephone-box.

He advanced to sign, and, taking a pen and leaning on the front of the
bureau, wrote in the visitor's book, in a careful, legible hand: 'Lionel
Belmont, New York.' Having thus written, and still resting on the right
elbow, he raised his right hand a little and waved the pen like a
delicious menace at Nina.

'Mr. Pank hasn't registered, either,' he said slowly, with a charming
affectation of solemnity, as though accusing Mr. Pank of some appalling
crime.

Nina laughed timidly as she pushed his room-ticket across the page of
the big book. She thought that Mr. Lionel Belmont was perfectly
delightful.

'No,' he hasn't,' she said, trying also to be arch; 'but he must.'

At that moment she happened to glance at the right hand of Mr. Belmont.
In the brilliance of the electric light she could see the fair skin of
the wrist and forearm within the whiteness of his shirt-sleeve. She
stared at what she saw, every muscle tense.

'I guess you can round up Mr. Pank yourself, my dear, later on,' said
Lionel Belmont, and turned quickly away, intent on the next thing.

He did not notice that her large eyes had grown larger and her pale face
paler. In another moment the hall was deserted again. Mr. Belmont had
ascended in the lift, Tom had gone to his rest, and the head
night-porter was concealed in the pagoda. Nina sank down limply on her
stool, her nostrils twitching; she feared she was about to faint, but
this final calamity did not occur. She had, nevertheless, experienced
the greatest shock of