idiocy of lovers, but one scarcely expects to hear this sort of thing from men of comparatively mature years. Do you realise, young man, that you are proposing to spend the rest of your life with Jeannine?”
“Blessed thought!” Roger exclaimed. “Come on, Dalmorres, we’ll take you along.”
“I should think so,” was the complacent reply. “My limousine is below. Perhaps you’d rather walk, Roger?”
“On the contrary, you had better come up in your limousine,” Roger replied. “I’m taking Jeannine in my own little bus. Tell your man the Knickerbocker.”
“Selfish pig,” Dalmorres muttered, with a gleam in his eye.
Roger had brought his chauffeur and Jeannine sat very close to him as they took their places.
“You are such a darling, Roger,” she murmured, when they were halfway to their destination and as soon as she had sufficient breath. “I love the way you—what is your word?—chaff Lord Dalmorres. Do all Englishmen talk to one another like that? Frenchmen would be fighting very soon.”
“Dalmorres and I understand each other pretty well,” Roger confided. “He’s a gay old spark and he loves to be chaffed about the girls.”
“He is very attractive,” Jeannine said.
“More women than you and I could count have found him so,” Roger observed drily. “I rather wish he’d kept away to-night, though.”
“We will dance most of the time,” Jeannine suggested, “then he will get tired and he will go away.”
She tripped across the pavement, her eyes dancing with happiness, very dainty and chic in the moonlight.
“‘Au temps de “la fleur” ils sont tous en folie,’“ she hummed. “To-night I feel like that. It is good to feel like that. I am not afraid any longer. That was silly. Monte Carlo is a good place.”
Then the swing door was flung open and, with a leer on his face and a drunken lurch to his footsteps, out came Pierre Viotti, ex-Mayor of La Bastide!
Pierre Viotti was without a doubt drunk, but he was joyously and happily drunk. Never had the world seemed to him a more wonderful or delightful place. In the restaurant he was just leaving he had met with much success. He had stood drinks to all the dancing ladies and most of the men. Supper bills had been surreptitiously slipped into his hand by the maître d’hôtel and promptly discharged. He had danced with the principal chanteuse and when he was sober he was no mean performer. What a life! What a brother he had! What a man he was! His idea—the motor boat. Millions and millions and millions it had brought. All the champagne in the world he could drink. All the girls in the world he could have. But not this one. Well, who cared? To-night it was impossible to hate any one. He pushed aside the protecting hand of the doorkeeper, took off his hat and made a low bow.
“Bon soir, Mademoiselle Jeannine,” he cried gaily. “It is your Mayor who salutes you.”
She shrank back but it was more in scorn than from any sort of fear. A village brat, he had called her. Her poise was the poise of a princess.
“Bon soir, Monsieur le Maire,” she said.
“Et bon soir, Monsieur,” Pierre Viotti sang out to Roger. “You heard the little tune Mademoiselle was singing as she entered. Ask her the meaning of it and then you will not understand. It is for us French—us of a different race!”
“Bon soir, Monsieur Viotti,” Roger answered calmly. “If you would be so kind as to stand on one side, it is our wish to enter.”
Pierre Viotti crushed himself against the wall. The sound of Roger’s voice had deadened a little his alcoholic good humour. There was a cloud upon the horizon, after all. He was no longer supremely happy. He felt something hard in his pocket. If only he dared! A quick business that would make of it and no more of these arguments with Paul.
“A good place,” he said, pointing backwards to the restaurant. “One amuses oneself there!”
Roger took Jeannine by the arm and passed on. Pierre Viotti would have followed them, but for the restraining arm of the doorkeeper.
“Hi!” he called out.
Roger turned his head. Something of the old malevolence was back in Viotti’s face.
“Listen,” he shouted. “You like my hotel. You go there sometimes. You come and see me. I show you something no one else in the world knows one little thing about. You come.”
He turned away and lurched out.
“Some one seems to have drawn his fangs,” Roger remarked, with a smile, as they settled themselves down at a corner table. “Perhaps we shall get a wedding present from him after all!”
“A bowl of poison perhaps,” Jeannine replied. “Nothing else.”
“What did he mean about showing us something no one else in the world knew anything about?” Roger speculated.
“I was wondering.”
Then for a brief space of time—one hour or something like it—life became an enchantment. With them was none of the weary-footed dancing of the tired professional or the lazy effort of the dinner guest who is doing his duty. To hold Jeannine in his arms was to Roger the most amazing content, and to lean shyly against him and let her feet fly over the floor to the very seductive music was to Jeannine the last word in happiness. They drank sparingly of the champagne, but they finished the whole of an omelette and ordered another. Dalmorres strolled in long after the time he had appointed and sunk into a chair with a sigh of virtuous resignation.
“What I have denied myself!” he murmured. “Tell them, young Roger, to give me a whisky and soda and a sandwich. I have been walking in the garden sooner than disturb this idyll.”
“Liar,” Roger answered, as he called a waiter.
Dalmorres lit a cigarette.
“Manners must be the first thing you teach your young man, Mademoiselle Jeannine,” he enjoined. “You, I am sure, will believe me. An hour ago it must have been that I looked in here and saw you two in this corner, looking so happy and so utterly content with each other that I had not the courage to disturb you, and I went back again into the cold night and promenaded—in the rain too—”
“Oh, la, la!” Jeannine interrupted, with a little peal of laughter. “I will not say that you do not speak the truth, Lord Dalmorres, but the night is warm, the moon is shining, there is no rain and you have your limousine.”
Dalmorres knocked the ash from his cigarette.
“It is a fact that I am dreaming,” he acknowledged. “A bad habit of mine. I am too susceptible and I suffer so that it affects my memory. I think that when that whisky and soda has arrived, I shall summon up my courage and invite the blond young lady to dance with me.”
“She will probably accept with pleasure,” Roger remarked, “as she happens to be the danseuse of the maison. I gather that all the little ladies who are here to-night, though, and the men too, have been having rather a good time. A wealthy Niçois who was being armed out just as we arrived has been standing free drinks to every one in the house.”
“A short rotund man with a brick-red complexion and black eyes?” Dalmorres enquired curiously.
Roger nodded. “What do you know about him?”
“I happen to have been up at a small select night restaurant on the hill, I forget the name, I was one of a party whom Miss Madge Saunders collected to visit some of the deserving institutions of Monte Carlo. Without a doubt, the same individual barged in. He embarked upon the same course of generosity there.”
Jeannine leaned across.
“So you have been up the hills with Maggie Saunders to-night, since we left you!”
“For