chapter did

the business. No insomnia since then. Sleep like a mite in a Gorgonzola, the instant my head touches the pillow--never read another word. But heaps of friends in the Fleet'll be wanting to borrow the book presently, depend on it. For we'll all be too scared of Germany to sleep--in the year 1916."

Laughter broke forth. Lady Wathe gasped, dabbing her tearful eyes with a lace-bordered handkerchief:

"Oh, Tido! will you dead-in-earnest Germans never learn what pulling a leg means?"

"_Ach ja_! I should have understood!" He had stared, frowned, and reddened savagely. Now, with a palpable effort, his equanimity was regained. He turned with a smiling remark to Patrine Saxham, as Lady Beauvayse breathed in Courtley's ear:

"You perfect pet! How I love you for that!"

"Man simply suffering for a set-down. Good egg, you!" murmured Franky in the other ear of the Commander.

"Felt sorry for him. Had to do something--common humanity!" rejoined Courtley, eating more and more pistachios. "Seems as over-crammed with their _Kultur_ as a pet garden-titmouse with coco-nut. Vain too, but that's the fault of the women. Lord! how they gush at those big, good-looking blighters. See the Saxham!--ready to climb into his waistcoat-pocket and stop there. Would, too, if she wasn't built on Dreadnought lines herself."

She was laughing into von Herrnung's smiling visage as he offered her a light from his cigar. For with the arrival of coffee and liqueurs, the fragrance of choice Havana and Turkish had begun to mingle with the tang of Mocha, the heady bouquet of choice wines, and the odours of fruit and flowers. The screens of frosted glass were rearranged,--the ladies had produced their cigarette-cases,--of gold with the monogram of the Goblin set in diamonds; of platinum adorned with turquoises and pearls wrought into the Beauvayse initial and coronet; and of humbler tortoiseshell, bearing in fanciful golden letters the name "Patrine"----

"Patrine..."

"The Saxham girl" had taken the tortoiseshell cigarette-case from the front of her low-cut, sleeveless bodice. Von Herrnung had leaned towards her, boldly exploring with his eyes the bosom where the trinket had been hiding, and read the golden letters. He smiled as he met her puzzled eyes, saying:

"'Patrine' is your name.... Now I know it I will not forget it! Tell me!"--he spoke in lowered tones--"why do you carry your cigarette-case just in that place?"

She laughed, half-shutting her long eyes and slightly lifting her big white shoulders. "Simply for convenience--when I'm in evening kit. Dressmakers don't allow us poor women pockets in these days."

"It may be so!" As von Herrnung spoke with a calculated roughness that he had found useful in dealing with many women, he took the cigarette-case from her, momentarily covering her hand with his own. As his curving fingers touched her palm, he felt the soft warm flesh wince at the contact. Her black brows drew together, her sleepy agate eyes shot him a hostile sidewise glance.

"I have not offended?" he whispered in some anxiety. And she answered in a louder tone, under cover of the talk, and laughter of the others:

"No! ... Only--I hate to be touched, that's all."

He smiled under the crisp tight roll of his red moustache, and his large, well-cut nostrils dilated and quivered.

"One day you will not hate it. I will wait for that day. But--about your cigarette-case--you do not now tell me the truth! ... The real reason is more subtle. You carry that thing there--under your corsage--to make live men envious of an object that cannot feel!"

"Really! ... What a lot you must know about women!"

The words were mocking, but the voice that uttered them was big, warm, and velvety. Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood--you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature--her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. Thrown with royal prodigality upon the back of the chair she occupied was an opera-mantle of cotton-backed emerald-green velvet lavishly furred with ermine and sables that were palpably false as the garish gold and jewels of the diadem that crowned her, yet became her big, bold, rather brazen beauty as well as though the Siberian weasel and the Arctic marten had been trapped and slain to deck and adorn her, instead of the white rabbit of ordinary commerce and the domestic pussy-cat.

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