Grant walked into the Carlton at a quarter past twelve that evening, the exact hour mentioned by Cleo in the note which the commissionaire at the Sporting Club had given to him. He left his coat and hat in the coat room, made his way inside the restaurant, which was as yet sparsely occupied, and, ignoring the efforts of the maitre d’h?tel to provide him with a table, strolled across to where Cleo was seated alone. She welcomed him with a bare uplifting of the eyebrows, the sparsest possible smile.

“You permit me?” he asked, with his hand on the back of her chair.

“Certainly,” she assented. “Sit down if you wish, but I have changed my mind. I have nothing to say to you.”

He summoned a waiter and ordered some wine.

“That seems unfortunate,” he remarked. “May I have the pleasure of providing you with your accustomed beverage?”

“You can order some tea for me,” she said shortly, “and as many cigarettes as you like. But, alas, you will be wasting your kindness. I have nothing to say to you.”

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “I should not be considered unreasonable if I were to ask why this change? I am here at your invitation.”

“It is permitted always to a woman to change her mind,” she reminded him. “I believe you’re one of those with whom frankness is best. I have changed mine because Itash—”

“Sometimes called Sammy,” he murmured.

“—has changed his attitude towards me.”

“All up with the little lady from the Café de Paris?” Grant queried.

“He has finished with her,” she confided. “It was nothing but a passing fancy, ministered to by her lies. I wish, instead of talking nonsense to you, I had killed her.”

“But, my dear lady, consider how different everything would have been,” Grant pointed out. “Things having happened, as they have, behold ourselves seated—friends, I trust—in this very pleasing place of entertainment, alive and well, and with perfectly robust futures. If you had killed that rather impossible young lady, where would you be now? In that uncomfortable-looking edifice which these wise people of Monte Carlo keep absolutely out of sight, awaiting your trial and not in the least sure what was going to happen to you.”

“I am satisfied, if you are,” she said shortly.

“Of course, as a patriotic American,” he went on, “there are drawbacks to the situation. You were going to explain to me, if I remember rightly, exactly how to save my country from her impending doom, and you were also going to reveal to me various nefarious schemes directed against her.”

“Imagination!” she declared. “Nothing that I said was true. It was just spite.”

“Well, I don’t know that it much matters,” he observed, sipping his wine. “I didn’t believe it, anyhow.”

“Why didn’t you believe it?” she demanded.

“Because,” he told her, “I have had some conversation with Count Itash. I have come to the conclusion that that young man is not a fool. Under those circumstances I do not see how he could possibly have confided important political secrets to you. Nor can I conceive any sane reason for his having put them upon paper in such a fashion that you could have stolen them. Therefore, the existence of any means by which you could have read the riddles of Itash’s brain does not seem to me possible.”

“So, to put it in plain words,” she suggested

“I think that you were romancing.”

She looked at him half mockingly, half in admiration.

“Really,” she confessed, “I find you, for quite an ordinary person, unusually quick of perception.”

“And to be equally honest,” he rejoined, “I find you only attractive inasmuch as you are entirely removed from the commonplace. You are not good-looking enough to be a danseuse here. I am not sure that you dance well enough. You just have qualities that go to the ordinary man’s head. And therefore shall we have one dance before I make my disappointed way back to the hotel?”

Again there was the beginning of that smile, which she seemed never to finish. They moved away to the music. When the dance was finished they found their way to two easy-chairs in a far corner of the Bar. She looked at him sombrely. The smile was no nearer breaking into fruition upon her lips.

“If I were not in love with Sammy,” she acknowledged, “I think that I should rather like you.”

“A pity about that subjunctive,” he sighed. “I am not at all sure that he deserves you.”

“If a man really deserved a woman,” she said, “it is perfectly certain that the woman would not care for him. That always happens.”

“It sounds platitudinal for you,” he commented.

“Pooh!” she scoffed. “We all have to be reminded of the things we know best. I am, as you have suggested, plain, dull, altogether ordinary. Yet I have gifts. Sammy, at one time, loved me desperately. If he ceases to love me and puts another in my place, I shall destroy him. At present his passion has returned. He has been very sweet to me for many hours, and so, Monsieur l’Armericain, let us say good-bye. He does not like you and it would do me no good to have him’ come here and find us together.”

Grant rose to his feet and bent low over her fingers.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I do not think that this is the end. You would doubtless prefer, under the circumstances, that I quit the restaurant.”
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