er knew it. Too
bad!"

She pouted childishly, gave her arch musical laugh with its three
soprano notes and upward inflection, and then accepted a quail with a
heavy sigh.

"When I was a boy," said Rathbone in a low concentrated voice of
reminiscence--he spoke rather quickly, for he had been trying in vain
during the whole of dinner to get a word in edgeways and feared to lose
his chance now--"when I was a boy I was in love, too, with some one
on the stage. Between ourselves--you won't mention it, will you, Miss
Luscombe?----"

"You can trust me," she said earnestly, with a look of Julia Neilson.

"Good! Well, I was in love, and I've got her initials--C. L.--tattooed
on me now!"

"Impossible! How exciting! Who is C. L.?"

He looked round the table and murmured in a low voice, "Cissie Loftus.
Isn't it odd? I wrote and told her about it, but I never received an
answer to my letter."

"Poor, poor boy! I call that really touching! Will you show me the
initials some day?"

"Oh no. Impossible." He was stern, adamantine. She hastily went on. "So
you're very keen--interested in the stage, Mr. Rathbone?"

"Well, in the stage door. I collect programmes, and I haven't missed a
first night since I was twenty!"

"Fancy! Then I ought to remember your face, at all the theatres!"

"I mean at the Gaiety," he said, "only the Gaiety."

"Oh, the Gaiety!" she turned her shoulder to him.

* * * * *

"Yes, Miss Daphne, if you would come out to New York you'd have a real
good time. You'd turn all the young fellow's heads. I'm afraid you'd do
a terrible amount of damage there. I should like to show you and Mrs.
Wyburn Newport in the season, too. You ladies have it all your own way
over the other side of----may I say, the herringpond?"

"Oh, please do; yes, _do_ say the herringpond!"

Daphne leant forward and said to Harry:

"Do you know who is that very distinguished-looking man who has just
come in--rather weary and a little grey on the temples? He bowed and
kissed the woman's hand so charmingly--at the next table to us. Looks
like a great diplomatist."

"Then he must be a stockbroker," said Valentia decidedly. "Every one
with the grand manner always is."

"Really! I can't say; I don't know any stockbrokers," said Miss
Luscombe.

"How distinguished that sounds!" murmured Vaughan.

"It's very clever of you, Miss Luscombe," said Lady Walmer; "I don't see
how you can help it! I know nobody else.