“I’ll go around,” I suggested, hurrying off, while Del Mar’s man tried to beat in the door.

Inside the little old man who had been listening saw that there was no means of escape.  He pulled off his coat and vest and turned them inside out.  On the inside he had prepared an exact copy of Jennings’ livery.

It was only a matter of seconds before he had completed his change.  For a moment he paused and looked at the two prostrate figures before him.  Then he took a rose from a vase on the table and placed it in Elaine’s hand.

Finally, with his whiskers and wig off he moved to the rear door where Del Mar’s man was beating and opened it.

“Look,” he cried pointing in an agitated way at Del Mar and Elaine.  “What shall we do?”

Del Mar’s man, who had never seen Jennings, ran to his master and the little old man, in his new disguise, slipped quietly into the hall and out the front door, where he had a taxicab waiting for him, down the street.

A moment later I burst open the other library door and Aunt Josephine followed me in, just as Jennings himself and Marie entered from the drawing-room.

It was only a moment before we had Del Mar, who was most in need of care, on the sofa and Elaine, already regaining consciousness, lay back in a deep easy chair.

As Del Mar moved, I turned again to Elaine who was now nearly recovered.

“How do you feel?” I asked anxiously.

Her throat was parched by the asphyxiating fumes, but she smiled brightly, though weakly.

“Wh-where did I get that?” she managed to gasp finally, catching sight of the rose in her hand.  “Did you put it there?”

I shook my head and she gazed at the rose, wondering.

Whoever the little man was, he was gone.

I longed for Craig.

CHAPTER VII

THE GRAY FRIAR

So confident was Elaine that Kennedy was still alive that she would not admit to herself what to the rest of us seemed obvious.

She even refused to accept Aunt Josephine’s hints and decided to give a masquerade ball which she had planned as the last event of the season before she closed the Dodge town house and opened her country house on the shore of Connecticut.

It was shortly after the strange appearance of the fussy old gentleman that I dropped in one afternoon to find Elaine addressing invitations, while Aunt Josephine helped her.  As we chatted, I picked up one from the pile and mechanically contemplated the address: 

“M.  Del Mar, Hotel La Coste, New York City.”

“I don’t like that fellow,” I remarked, shaking my head dubiously.

“Oh, you’re—­jealous, Walter,” laughed Elaine, taking the envelope away from me and piling it again with the others.

Thus it was that in the morning’s mail, Del Mar, along with the rest of us, received a neatly engraved little invitation: