ag contained
the tools....

The shock was frightful, disastrous, tragic; but it had solved the
situation by destroying it. Practically, Nina no longer had a father. He
had existed for about four hours as a magnificent reality, full of
possibilities; he now ceased to be recognisable.

She was about to pick up a third telegram when a slight noise caused her
to turn swiftly; she had forgotten to keep her little pink ears alert.
Her father stood in the doorway. He was certainly the victim of some
extraordinary emotion; his face worked; he seemed at a loss what to do
or say; he seemed pained, confused, even astounded. Simple, foolish Nina
had upset the balance of his equations.

Then he resumed his self-control and came forward into the room with a
smile intended to be airy. Meanwhile Nina had not moved. One is inclined
to pity the artless and defenceless girl in this midnight duel of wits
with a shrewd, resourceful, and unscrupulous man of the world. But one's
pity should not be lavished on an undeserving object. Though Nina
trembled, she was mistress of herself. She knew just where she was, and
just how to behave. She was as impregnable as Gibraltar.

'Well,' said Mr. Lionel Belmont, genially gazing at her pose, 'you do
put snap into it, any way.'

'Into what?' she was about to inquire, but prudently she held her
tongue. Drawing, herself up with the gesture of an offended and
unapproachable queen, the little thing sailed past him, close past her
own father, and so out of the room.

'Say!' she heard him remark: 'let's straighten this thing out, eh?'

But she heroically ignored him, thinking the while that, with all his
sins, he was attractive enough. She still held the first telegram in her
long, thin fingers.

So ended the nocturne.

IV

At five o'clock the next morning Nina's trifling nose was pressed
against the windowpane of her cubicle. In the enormous slate roof of the
Majestic are three rows of round windows, like port-holes. Out of the
highest one, at the extremity of the left wing, Nina looked. From thence
she could see five other vast hotels, and the yard of Charing Cross
Station, with three night-cabs drawn up to the kerb, and a red van of
W.H. Smith and Son disappearing into the station. The Strand was quite
empty. It was a strange world of sleep and grayness and disillusion.
Within a couple of hundred yards or so of her thousands of people lay
asleep, and they would all soon wake into the disil