II - THE GIRL IN RED

It was shortly before eleven o’clock on the evening of the Associated Arts Club ball that Paul Wendover turned into the Ambassadors’ Hotel. It was a beautiful June evening, peaceful and placid, and, outwardly, at any rate, there was no sign of coming strife or trouble. In its way the Associated Arts Club dance was an important social function, though the great hotel, with its fine suites of rooms and the most competent staff in Europe, made little or nothing of it. Half-a-dozen big dances had taken place there without disturbing the thousand or so of guests who passed every night under that magnificent roof in Piccadilly.

Paul Wendover looked, in his six-feet of splendid manhood and immaculate evening dress, a typical, well-groomed Englishman, who was out for an evening of simple pleasure. He strolled through the reception rooms towards the ballroom with the air of a man who has nothing on his mind, and who is bent entirely on looking for casual acquaintances. And certainly, in the ordinary way, the Associated Arts Club dance promised to be amusing. To begin with, it was emphatically a Bohemian function of the most brilliant kind, and everybody connected with literature and the stage would probably be present. Just for a moment Wendover stood there, regarding the ebb and flow of beautifully-dressed women and well-known men, and then he thrilled and stiffened to his fingertips as his eye encountered a slim figure in scarlet—the figure of a tall, graceful girl, brilliantly fair and dazzling, her head crowned with great masses of orange-red hair, twisted like a coronet about her brows.

It was the girl that Wendover had seen in Fleet-street that afternoon. He knew that he could not possibly be mistaken. And yet there was nothing about her now to suggest a girl who is struggling to keep her head above the social waters. She seemed to stand out from the rest of the crowd like a thing apart. It wasn’t altogether that she was more outstandingly beautiful than many other exquisitely-dressed women there, but there was about her some intangible charm and distinction that seemed to lift her, in Wendover’s eyes at least, far and away above the rest of them.

To begin with, it seemed to him that she looked as no Englishwoman could have done. And she was all the more attractive because the man she was with was not in the least distinguished. He was just an ordinary Englishman, sandy-haired and freckled, a man with whom, as a matter of fact, he had been at school.

But Wendover had no eyes just then for Sir Peter Cavendish; he was looking at the girl to the exclusion of everything else. She seemed to float round the room with the nameless grace and abandon of a beautiful scarlet but