f a brief advertisement, which she read naturally, with heightened
interest:

IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of Sofia
his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields,
W.C. 3

IV

MUTINY

Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm
style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her.
Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture to
herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing (no
matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia,
and that he would see the advertisement, and communicate privately as
requested, and hear news of her, and come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the
Cafe des Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur
and confound Mama Therese with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the
hand and lead her out and induct her into such an environment as suited her
rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if
not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house
sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture,
amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.

She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the
family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal
use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards,
or to concerts and matinees....

At about this stage her chateaux en Espagne began to rock upon their
foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Therese and
Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they
habitually consumed in the cafe when the evening rush was over, the tables
undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull
hours till closing time.

Thus reminded that it was nine o'clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening
in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn't wearily happened
the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of
Time, and wasn't scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and
the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook
herself and put away the vanity of dreams.

But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.

In the rear of the room Mama Therese and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly over
t