me cab until I brought her back to her own door.

We drove to a famous showy restaurant close to Piccadilly Circus, where
Beatrice accomplished the kind of entrance which delighted her heart,
with attendants fluttering about her, and a messenger posting back to
the cab for a forgotten fan, and a deal of bustle and rustle of one sort
and another. A quarter of an hour was devoted to the choice of a menu in
a dining-room which resembled the more ornate type of music-hall, and
was of about the same size. The flashing garishness of it all delighted
Beatrice, and the heat of its atmosphere suited both her mood and her
extremely _decollete_ toilette.

I remember beginning to speak of my previous evening's engagement while
Beatrice sipped the rather sticky champagne, which was the first item of
the meal to reach us. But a certain sense of unfitness or
disinclination stopped me after a few sentences, and I did not again
refer to my new friends; though I had been thinking a good deal of
Constance Grey and her plain-faced, plain-spoken aunt. I felt strangely
out of key with my environment in that glaring place, and the strains of
an overloud orchestra, when they came crashing through the buzz of talk
and laughter, and the clatter of glass and silver, were rather a relief
to me as a substitute for conversation. I drank a great deal of
champagne, and resented the fact that it seemed to have no stimulating
effect upon me. But Beatrice was in a purring stage of contentment, her
colour high, her passionate eyes sparkling, and low laughter ever
atremble behind her full, red lips.

After the dinner we drove to another place exactly like the restaurant,
all gilding and crimson plush, and there watched a performance, which
for dulness and banality it would be difficult to equal anywhere. It was
more silly than a peep-show at a country fair, but it was all set in a
most gorgeous and costly frame. The man who did crude and ancient
conjuring tricks was elaborately finely dressed, and attended by
monstrous footmen in liveries of Oriental splendour. What he did was
absurdly tame; the things he did it with, his accessories, were
barbarously gorgeous.

This was not one of the great "Middle Class Halls," as they were called
during their first year of existence, but an old-established haunt of
those who aimed at "seeing life"--a great resort of ambitious young
bloods about town. Not very long before this time, a powerful trust had
been formed t