“I rather think I enjoy an audience,” she said, with a reflective air, and Ste. Marie laughed aloud because he knew that the naive speech was so very true.  This lady, with her many good qualities and her bad ones—­not a few, alas!—­had an undeniable passion for red fire that had amused him very much on more than one past occasion.

“Please go home!” she said once more.

But when the man only shook his head, she raised her hands a little way and dropped them again in her lap, in an odd gesture which seemed to say that she had done all she could do, and that if anything disagreeable should happen now, and he should be involved in it, it would be entirely his fault because she had warned him.

Then quite abruptly a mood of irresponsible gayety seemed to come upon her.  She refused to have anything more to do with serious topics, and when Ste. Marie attempted to introduce them she laughed in his face.  As she had said in the beginning she wished to do, she harked back to old days (the earlier stages of what might be termed the Morrison regime), and it seemed to afford her great delight to recall the happenings of that epoch.  The conversation became a dialogue of reminiscence which would have been entirely unintelligible to a third person, and was, indeed, so to Captain Stewart, who once came across the room, made a feeble effort to attach himself, and presently wandered away again.

They unearthed from the past an exceedingly foolish song all about one “Little Willie” and a purple monkey climbing up a yellow stick.  It was set to a well-known air from Don Giovanni, and when Duval, the basso, heard them singing it he came up and insisted upon knowing what it was about.  He laughed immoderately over the English words when he was told what they meant, and made Ste. Marie write them down for him on two visiting-cards.  So they made a trio out of “Little Willie,” the great Duval inventing a bass part quite marvellous in its ingenuity, and they were compelled to sing it over and over again, until Ste. Marie’s falsetto imitation of a tenor voice cracked and gave out altogether, since he was by nature barytone, if anything at all.

The other guests had crowded round to hear the extraordinary song, and when the song was at last finished several of them remained, so that Ste. Marie saw he was to be allowed an uninterrupted tete-a-tete with Olga Nilssen no longer.  He therefore drifted away, after a few moments, and went with Duval and one of the other men across the room to look at some small jade objects—­snuff-bottles, bracelets, buckles, and the like—­which were displayed in a cabinet cleverly reconstructed out of a Japanese shrine.  It was perhaps ten minutes later when he looked round the place and discovered that neither Mlle. Nilssen nor Captain Stewart was to be seen.