seems to be an idea of paying Gobert a lump sum to keep him quiet, and then finance his experiments.”

“Experiments! I tell you, Baldwin, the man’s a swindler.”

“Swindler or not, there’ll be a big drop in the market if rumours get about.”

“We can hold on.”

Baldwin Carr looked doubtful, as he rose to go:

“I’m dining with Derwent, and I’ll tell him what you say, but....”

Stuart accompanied him downstairs. The dinner-gong was drowning the house in sound, and the postman had just thundered at the door. The butler stepped forward with a letter on a salver. When Baldwin had gone, Stuart slit the envelope, and drew forth a dance invitation:

“‘Madame Marcel des Essarts’—Mother, who’s Madame Marcel des Essarts?” as Mrs. Heron, on the arm of her brother-in-law, Arthur Heron, came out of the drawing-room.

“Oh, don’t you remember, Stuart? She used to visit me quite often when you were a schoolboy; a white-haired aristocratic old lady. And once or twice she brought her little granddaughter; such a pretty child, and so beautifully dressed, like a French doll, black hair and red lips and a waxen face——”

“And she wasn’t allowed to play with the tortoise for fear it should get ferocious and spring at her! Yes, I remember. She’s evidently sufficiently grown-up for the ball-room now.”

“Merle des Essarts must be about twenty,” remarked Mrs. Heron, helping herself to olives; “she has been abroad a great deal, I believe. If she is half as lovely as she promised to be, she ought to make a brilliant match.”

Stuart smiled.

“What do you think of our wizard in diamonds, Arthur?”

CHAPTER II
A CHOICE OF HEROES

The same evening, two girls were huddled in a doorway of His Majesty’s Theatre. They had drifted with the crowd down the stone steps leading from the Upper Circle, their brains struggling to return to reality from the world-that-is-not. Then a voice pierced bewilderment with the exclamation: “Why, it’s raining!” and they emerged on to an unfamiliar back street, pavements dark mirrors of glistening wet, something sinister about the hovering gnome-like figures who sprang alive at their elbows, offering in hoarse voices to fetch a vehicle. And then umbrellas began to slide up before their owners had even quitted the shelter of the outjutting porch; umbrellas with nasty vindictive spikes. Other people rolled away in landaulettes and taxi-cabs. It was essentially one of those occasions which cry out for the luxury of male protection; for the authoritative voice to say: “stay where you are for the moment, while I look for the car.” Then the beckoning summons, the dash to the kerbstone, an address given, a door slammed, the swift easy glide up the street: “Now we’re all right,” remarks the protective male, as he adjusts rug and window; “beastly night....”

Which is why Peter remarked suddenly, as they waited for one of the shadow-shapes to be faithful to the trust reposed in him: “We shall have to admit a man, Merle, because of the taxis. It’s all right to be a shivering outcast when you get home and think about it. It’s the present part of the business I object to. What on earth possessed your grandmother to want the use of her own carriage to-night?”

“It’s the birthday of an Ambassador,” Merle explained apologetically; “and she so hates going in four-wheelers.”

The crowd was thinning. Presently they would be the only two remaining in the doorway.

“It will be awful to be quite the last of all,” the elder girl went on apprehensively. “They won’t let us sleep in the theatre, I’m sure; not after the opera-glasses have been put away. And the backs of theatres aren’t in London at all; they’re in a horrible phantom neighbourhood of their own.”

—“’Ere y’are, lidies!” Their wheeled deliverance was at hand.

Peter was spending the night with Merle. She always appreciated the moment, when, softly closing behind them the door of the house in Lancaster Gate, she attended to the bolts and locks, while Merle pierced the rich blackness with the rays of a small electric lantern, which was to guide them burglariously up the thickly carpeted stairs. It was good, remembering their shivering moments in No-Man’s-Land, now to sprawl in luxury across the brocaded bed-cover, and watch Merle submit to the ministrations of the elderly French bonne, who maided Mademoiselle, and also had a great deal to say as to what was comme il faut for the latter’s general deportment.

“Bonsoir, Nicole. Et merci bien.”

“’Soir, Mesdemoiselles. And do not stay too long chattering; it is not good for the complexion.” Nicole retired.

“Good Heavens!” ejaculated Peter; “that I should live to own a friend who owns a maid. A maid and a dressing-gown. Can’t you do something about it? You know, it’s quite easy to pull off your own stockings, once you’ve learnt how.”

“Have you brought a comb this time?” Merle enquired with dangerous politeness.

“No, I haven’t. ’Cos why? ’Cos mine has only seven teeth left in its head, and I daren’t expose its nakedness to the eye of Nicole, since she will lay out the contents of my suit-case on the bed, as they do for the Lady Alice in novelette society house-parties.”

She brushed fiercely at her tangle of curling fair hair, that was not long enough for the need of hairpins, nor short enough to lie smooth to her head.

“About the comb,” she continued; “I always say: ‘don’t tell me they’ve forgotten to put it in again! That comes of letting Amy pack for me’—or Bertha or Marion or Pussy, or any other imaginary small sister I haven’t got. It quite deceives Nicole; she sympathises, lends me your second-best, and I daresay wonders at the multiplicity of my mother’s offspring.”

Merle laughed, and turning out the electric lights cunningly fitted into the three-tiered gilt candelabra, switched on instead the tiny red lamp which stood beside her Second Empire bedstead.

“Voilà! The appropriate lighting for the traditional girlish-chatter-while-they-brush-their-hair. Are you serious in proposing to admit a man to our duet?”

“Quite, if we can find one to suit. I want to try a trio; it might be interesting.”

“It might be dangerous,” Merle supplemented. She sat on the edge of the bed, hands clasped about her knees, the tapestried canopy casting a deep shadow on her delicately-cut features, flawless as a profile on a cameo, colourless as ivory. Something of the French château yet lurked in her quaintly courteous manners; something of the French convent in the soft voice, in the heavy eyelids swift to drop as an overweary flower. The des Essarts were of pure Gallic stock, though their devotion to the Royalist cause had half a century before caused them to seek a permanent dwelling in England. But Peter declared that Merle still carried about with her a permanent aura of white lilies in a cloister garden; that she should by rights always be clad in an Empire satin frock, high under the arms; and that if she followed her natural instincts, she would never enter or quit a room without a deep reverence.

She was certainly “of a loveliness,” as Nicole was wont to declare, morning and evening, like a Benediction.

“It might be dangerous,” Merle repeated thoughtfully.

“You mean, if one of us fell in love with him?”

“Or both.”

“‘The Man Who Came Between Them,’ or ‘The Eternal