well to have seen; and, besides, his affairs were
gaining a strange hue; glamour was in them. He felt a little thrill
when the massive club porter, approaching them in the hall, spoke
Carigny's name.

"Monsieur Carigny telephoned," said the porter. "He particularly
desired that Monsieur le Prince should be told, as soon as he
arrived, that Monsieur Carigny would call at half-past four."

The Prince nodded. "I shall be upstairs, in the card-room," he
answered, and passed on.

In the card-room were several men of the Prince's who had known
Carigny in his Paris days, while there was scarcely a man present who
had not heard some version of the Carigny story. To certain of them
the Prince spoke of the visit he was expecting. He had decided that,
since the meeting was not by any means to be avoided or hidden, it
would best serve him to announce it to take his part in the drama and
squeeze it of what credit he could. It spread through the room and
through the club like a scandal. There was a throng in the room,
expectant, hungry for the possibility of a scene. In the recess of a
tall window, the Prince, superb in his self-possession, a figure in a
world of players that was past, with his pale, severe face impassive
under his white hair, made the crowd of them seem vulgar and raucous
by contrast with him. Dupontel, watching him, had a moment of
consternation; the Prince seemed a thing too supremely complete, too
perfect as a product of his world, to risk upon the turn of the
cards.

A club servant entered, bearing a card on a salver, and the talk
stilled as he presented it to the Prince. He, in converse with a
veteran who had known Carigny, took the card and held it in his
fingers without looking at it while he finished what he was saying.
All eyes were on him; it was a neat piece of social bravado. He
glanced at the card at last.

"Announce Monsieur Carigny," he said to the servant, and went on
talking. Dupontel felt like cheering him. The talk resumed, in a
changed key.

The door opened, and the servant was once more visible, standing back
against it, not without a sense of his importance as, say, a
scene-shifter in the play. His voice, rolling the r, was a flat
bellow of ceremony.

"Monsieur Car-rigny," he announced, "and Monsieur Georges Car-rigny!"

Every one turned. Through the door which the servant held open there
advanced two men. The first was bearded, a large man, definitely
elderly, who walked with a cu