offered.

"Your price is prohibitive. I've nothing to own up to."

"Well then--good night," she said.

Lightly, swiftly, she fled from the conservatory, and was soon
irrecoverable in the crowd.

The next morning Victor Field left Vienna for London; but before he left
he wrote a letter to Peter Wohenhoffen. In the course of it he said:
"There was an Englishwoman at your ball last night with the reasoning
powers of a detective in a novel. By divers processes of elimination and
induction, she had formed all sorts of theories about no end of things.
Among others, for instance, she was willing to bet her halidome that a
certain Prince Louis Leczinski, who seems to have gone on the spree some
years ago, and never to have come home again--she was willing to bet
anything you like that Leczinski and I--_moi qui vous parle_--were to
all intents and purposes the same. Who was she, please? Rather a tall
woman, in a black domino, with gray eyes, or grayish-blue, and a nice
voice."

In the answer which he received from Peter Wohenhoffen towards the end
of the week, Peter said: "There were nineteen Englishwomen at my
mother's party, all of them rather tall, with nice voices, and gray or
blue-gray eyes. I don't know what colours their dominoes were. Here is a
list of them."

The names that followed were names of people whom Victor Field almost
certainly would never meet. The people Victor knew in London were the
sort of people a little literary man might be expected to know. Most of
them were respectable; some of them even deemed themselves rather smart,
and patronized him right Britishly. But the nineteen names in Peter
Wohenhoffen's list ("Oh, me! Oh, my!" cried Victor) were names to make
you gasp.

All the same, he went a good deal to Hyde Park during the season, and
watched the driving.

"Which of all those haughty high-born beauties is she?" he wondered
futilely.

And then the season passed, and then the year; and little by little, of
course, he ceased to think about her.

* * * * *

One afternoon last May, a man, habited in accordance with the fashion of
the period, stopped before a hairdresser's shop in Knightsbridge
somewhere, and, raising his hat, bowed to the three waxen ladies who
simpered from the window.

"Oh! It's Mr. Field!" a voice behind him cried. "What are those cryptic
rites that you're performing? What on earth are you bowing into a
hairdresser's window for?"--a smoot