Liane put out a hand and caught his. "But I wish you to stay. I promise you will be welcome. My friends will be delighted. One of them in especial I am anxious you should know. You will find him well worth your while, one of the most interesting men in New York, quite a social power in his way."
"A quiet way, my friend, but a very real one."
There was more meaning in her eyes than in her words. Lanyard hung in doubt. Impossible to misread the sincerity of her desire to have him stay on. But her motive?
He had delayed too long. Voices sounded in the hallway, the gay accents of a woman predominating. Then the door opened; five people entered.
The first was a pretty young thing, piquantly fair and petite, with glowing face and merry eyes, at sight of whom Lanyard felt warranted in breathing an invocation to his prophetic soul. For now, it seemed, chance or predestination was making good that presentiment to which he had confessed during supper at the Ritz.
This brilliant little shape of life in the dark rectangle of the doorway had been conspicuously one of that party whose forbidding host had excited the aversion of Eve de Montalais and, in himself, half-formed forebodings. The man at whom she was so gayly gurgling over her shoulder, who wore both topper and grin at the doggish slant which becomes the author of an amusingly improper wheeze, was the little chap of the weazened wise mask whom Lanyard privately reckoned court jester to the Sultan of Loot. The latter in very person bulked in the shadowy background provided by the corridor, a presence vast but vague, betrayed by the baleful burning of fire opals as a thunderhead on a summer's night may remain more sensed than seen till a glimmer of lightning lends definition to its loom. Behind lurked a fourth, a figure still more indefinite. And in the rear a gleam picked out the hairless poll of Theodore, inclined at a servile angle.
Discovering Liane Delorme all at once, the lady on the threshold registered rapture, then ran to her with glad hands extended, her slight little body bearing an extravagant wrap of Russian sables with a grace as dainty as a fay's. Lips that didn't need paint to point their pretty contours bubbling joyously--"Darling Liane! You luscious thing! How we've missed you!"--she precipitated herself into Liane's arms and printed inconsiderate kisses upon that studiously composed complexion. When she permitted Liane to disengage and present Lanyard, he received an almost disconcertingly cordial smile and a tiny hand on which blazed in insolent beauty what he rated at first glance the most exquisite emeralds he had ever seen, who in his day had been somewhat an amateur of emeralds.