n
socks. However, in some way or other I managed to drive it home (this
was when we were already in the taxi) that he need not look upon this as
an evening's entertainment to which he was escorting either his own or
anybody else's sister.

This was part of the business of looking after Miss Million.

We were at Piccadilly Circus when the young man at my side protested:
"But we can't get in, you know! I'm not a member of this thing. I can't
take you in, Miss Lovelace----"

"I'm Smith, the lady's-maid of one of the ladies who's in the club, and
I've come to wait for my mistress," I told him. "That's perfectly
simple. And I daresay it'll allow me to see something of what's going
on!"

Here we drew up at a side street. It was half full of cars and taxis,
half full with a rebuilding of scaffolding that made a tunnel over the
basement.

The door of the club was beyond the scaffolding and a tall
commissionaire, with a breast glittering with medals, opened and closed
it with the movements of a punkah-wallah. Inside was red carpet and a
blaze of lights and an inner glass door.

In this vestibule there was a little knot of men in chauffeurs'
liveries, with wet gleaming on the shoulders of their coats, for an
unexpected shower had just come on. I was glad of it. This gave me, too,
my excuse for waiting there, when one of the attendants slipped up to me
and looked inquiringly down at me in my correct, outdoor black things.

"I am to wait," I said, "for my mistress."

"Very good, Miss. Would you like a chair in the ladies' cloak-room?"

"No. I don't think she will be very long, thank you," I said. And I
heard Mr. Brace, behind me, saying in his embarrassed, stiff, young
voice: "I am waiting with this lady."

(The commissionaires and people must have thought that the little,
chestnut-haired lady's-maid in black had got hold of a most superior
sort of young man!)

I stepped farther up the vestibule towards a long door with a bevelled,
oval, glass-panelled top. Evidently the door of the supper-room. From
beyond it came the muffled crash and lilt of dance music that set my own
foot tapping in time on the smooth floor. I looked through the glass
panel that framed, as it were, the gayest of coloured moving pictures.

The big room was a sort of papier-mache Alhambra; all zigzaggy arches
and gilded columns and decorations, towering above a spread of
supper-tables. Silver and white napery were blushing to pink under the
glow