Offering cigarettes in a golden casket, she selected and lighted one for herself.

“You have servants in the house, then?”

“Do I look like a woman who does her own housework?”

“You do not,” he affirmed politely.  “But can you blame me for wondering where your servants’ve been all through this racket?”

“They sleep on the top floor, behind sound-proof doors,” his hostess explained complacently, “and have orders to answer only when I ring, even if they should happen to hear anything.  I’ve a passion for privacy in my own home—­another whim, if you like.”

“It’s nothing to me, I assure you,” he protested.  “Minding my own business is one of the best little things I do.”

“If that’s so, why do you walk uninvited into strange bedrooms at all hours, pretending to be a policeman, with a cock-and-bull yarn about a burglar—­”

“But there was a burglar!” P. Sybarite contended brightly.  “You saw him yourself.”

“No.”

“But—­but you did see him—­later, on the stairs!”

Smiling, the woman shook her head.  “I saw no burglar—­merely a dear friend.  In short, if it interests you to know, I saw my husband.”

“Madam!” P. Sybarite sat up with a shocked expression.

“Oh,” said the woman lightly, “we’re good enough for one another—­he and I. He deserved what he got when he married me.  But that’s not saying I’m content to see him duck what’s coming to him for to-night’s deviltry.  In fact, I mean to get him before he gets me.  Are you game to lend me a hand?”

“Me, madam!” cried P. Sybarite in alarm.  “Far be it from me to come between husband and wife!”

“Don’t be afraid:  I’m not asking you to dabble your innocent hands in a fellow-human’s blood—­merely to run an errand for me.”

“Really—­I’d rather be excused.”

“Really,” she mocked pleasantly, “you won’t be.  I’m a gentle creature but determined—­frail but firm, you know.  Perhaps you’ve heard of me—­Mrs. Jefferson Inche?”

Decidedly he had; and so had nine-tenths of New York’s newspaper-reading population.  His eyes widened with new interest.

“Truly?” he said, civilly responsive to the challenge in her announcement.  “But I never knew Mrs. Jefferson Inche was beautiful.”

“It needs a beautiful woman to be known as the most dangerous in Town,” she explained with modest pride.

“But—­ah—­Mr. Inche, I understand, died some years ago.”

“So he did.”

“Yet you speak of your husband—?”

“Of my present husband, whose name I don’t wear for reasons of real-estate.  I took the rotter on because he’s rich and will be richer when his father dies; he married me because he was rotten and I had the worst reputation he could discover.  So we’re quits there.  If our marriage comes out prematurely, he’ll be disinherited; so we’ve agreed to a sub-rosa arrangement