ening. Behind him, a
man in black appeared. The car stopped. The first man opened the door.
Cassy got out. The other man additionally assisted by looking on and
moving aside. Cassy went into a hall where a young person who did not
resemble the Belle Chocolatiere but whose costume suggested her,
diligently approached.

"Would madame care to go upstairs?"

No, madame would not. But Cassy, instinctively insolent to
pretentiousness, was very simple with the simple. "Thank you. Will you
mind taking my wrap? Thank you again."

She looked about the hall. Before she could inventory it, here was
another man. "A nice trick you played on me," Cassy threw at him. "I was
half-way before I discovered it. The orchids reconciled me. Thank you
for them. Who is here?"

Smiling, deferential, apparently modest, perfectly sent out in perfectly
cut evening clothes, Paliser took her hand. "You are and, incidentally,
I am."

Cassy withdrew her hand. "I suppose you think you are a host in
yourself."

"Merely the most fortunate of mortals," replied Paliser, who could be
eighteenth-century when he liked, but who seldom bothered to keep it up.

Already he had been doing a little inventorying on his own account. The
basilica frock did not say much and what it did say was not to his
taste. The Sunday night fantasy he much preferred. It was rowdy, but it
was artistic. But beauty may be dishonoured, it cannot be vulgarised.
Even in pseudo-Parisianisms Cassy was a gem. A doubt though, one that
had already visited him, returned. Was the game worth the possible
scandal?

But now Cassy was getting back at him. "To stand about with the most
fortunate of mortals ought to be a shape of bliss. As it happens, I
would rather sit."

"Naturally. Only, worse luck, there is no throne."

Cassy gave it to him again: "There is a court fool, though. Where are
your cap and bells?"

"Not on you at any rate."

He motioned and Cassy passed on into a room beyond which other rooms
extended, each different, but all in the same key, a monotone attenuated
by lustres and the atmosphere, infinitely relaxing, which wealth
exhales.

Cassy's thin nostrils quivered. Since childhood, it was her first breath
of anything similar. It appeased and disarmed this anarchist who was
also an autocrat.

"Will you sit here?"

Paliser was drawing a chair. The table before it lacked the adjacent
severity. On it were dishes of Sevres and of gold. Adjacently were three
men. Th