buckskin
from beaded hunting-shirt to fringed leggings and dainty moccasins,
bent to peer into his face.

"Who are you?" she demanded curiously. "I don't seem to know you--"

"That, child, you have already proved."

"I?... Proved?... How do you mean?"

"You alone have not yet blushed."

And wheeling mischievously to the others, he covered them with
widespread hands in burlesque benediction.

"The unction of my deep damnation abide with ye, my children, now and
forevermore!" he chanted, showering sparks from crepitant finger-tips;
and bounded lightly into the elevator.

"But your mask!" protested Scheherazade in a pet. "You've no
right--when we all unmasked at supper."

Through the iron fretwork of the gate, the little gentleman shot a
Parthian spark or two.

"I wear no mask!" he informed them solemnly as the car shot from
sight.

The conceit tickled him; he had it still in mind when he alighted at
the ball-room floor.

Pausing in the anteroom, he struck an artificial pose on his high red
heels and stroked thin, satiric lips with slender fingers, reviewing
the crush with eyes that glinted light-hearted malice through the
scarlet visor; seeking a certain one and finding her not among those
many about him--their gay exotic trappings half hidden beneath wraps
of modern convention assumed against impending departure.

A hedge of backs hid from him the ball-room, choking the wide, high
arch of its entrance.

Turning to one side, he began to pick a slow way through the press,
and so presently found himself shoulder to shoulder with elderly and
pompous Respectability in a furred great-coat; who, all ready for the
street, with shining topper poised at breast-level, had delayed his
going for an instant's guarded confabulation with a youngish man
conspicuous in this, that he, alone of all that company, was in simple
evening dress.

Their backs were toward P. Sybarite, but by the fat pink folds above
the back of Respectability's collar and the fat white side-whiskers
adorning his plump pink chops, Beelzebub knew that he encountered for
the second time that evening Respectability of the gold-capped cane.

Without the least shame, he paused and cocked sharp ears to catch what
he could of the conversation between these two.

Little enough he profited by his open eavesdropping; what he heard was
scarcely illuminating when applied to the puzzle that haunted him.

"She won't--that's flat," Respectability's compani