. Miss Flossie Lane stood there, very becomingly dressed in a
tailor-made costume of covert coating. She wore a hat with yellow
buttercups, and she had shown a certain reticence as regards cosmetics
which amounted to a tacit acknowledgment of his prejudices.

"Miss Lane!" he exclaimed.

She looked at him with wide-open eyes.

"But you were expecting me, weren't you?" she asked. "I remembered your
inviting me quite well, but I couldn't remember where you said, so I
thought I'd better come and fetch you. I haven't done wrong, have I?"

"Most certainly not," Wingate replied. "Come in, please. I'll ring for a
cocktail and send the man down into the restaurant to engage a table."

She sank into an easy-chair and looked around her, while Wingate did as
he had suggested. The sitting room, filled with trophies of curiously
mixed characteristics--a Chinese idol squatting in one corner, some West
African weapons above it, two very fine moose heads over a quaintly
shaped fireplace, and a row of choice Japanese prints over the
bookcase--was a very masculine but eminently habitable apartment. Miss
Lane looked around her and approved.

"This is quite the nicest flat in the Court," she declared, "and I've
been in so many of them. How did you find time to furnish it like this? I
thought that you'd only just arrived from America."

"I come to London often enough to keep this little suite here," he
explained. "I had it even through the war. Sometimes I lend it to a
friend. I am one of those domestic people," he added with a smile, "who
like to have a home of some sort to come to at the end of a journey."

"You're much too nice to live alone," she ventured.

"Well, you see, your sex has decreed that I shall up to the present," he
remarked. "Here come the cocktails. I hope that yours won't be too dry.
Where will you lunch--the restaurant or the grillroom?"

"The grillroom," she decided, after a moment's reflection. "We can go and
sit out in the foyer afterwards and have our coffee."

The cocktails and Wingate's choice of a table were alike approved.
Wingate himself, as soon as he had recovered from the bland assurance
with which his guest had manufactured her invitation, devoted himself
with a somewhat hard light in his eyes to the task of entertaining her.
The whole gamut of her attractions was let loose for his benefit. He
represented to her the one desirable thing, difficult of attainment,
perhaps, but worth the effort. Soft