“Ah, in spirit!  But in the flesh?”

“Why, poppet!” he retorted in suave surprise—­“it isn’t possible that you missed me?”

And she, too, coloured; while a third, a girl dressed all in buckskin from beaded hunting-shirt to fringed leggings and dainty moccasins, bent to peer into his face.

“Who are you?” she demanded curiously.  “I don’t seem to know you—­”

“That, child, you have already proved.”

“I?...  Proved?...  How do you mean?”

“You alone have not yet blushed.”

And wheeling mischievously to the others, he covered them with widespread hands in burlesque benediction.

“The unction of my deep damnation abide with ye, my children, now and forevermore!” he chanted, showering sparks from crepitant finger-tips; and bounded lightly into the elevator.

“But your mask!” protested Scheherazade in a pet.  “You’ve no right—­when we all unmasked at supper.”

Through the iron fretwork of the gate, the little gentleman shot a Parthian spark or two.

“I wear no mask!” he informed them solemnly as the car shot from sight.

The conceit tickled him; he had it still in mind when he alighted at the ball-room floor.

Pausing in the anteroom, he struck an artificial pose on his high red heels and stroked thin, satiric lips with slender fingers, reviewing the crush with eyes that glinted light-hearted malice through the scarlet visor; seeking a certain one and finding her not among those many about him—­their gay exotic trappings half hidden beneath wraps of modern convention assumed against impending departure.

A hedge of backs hid from him the ball-room, choking the wide, high arch of its entrance.

Turning to one side, he began to pick a slow way through the press, and so presently found himself shoulder to shoulder with elderly and pompous Respectability in a furred great-coat; who, all ready for the street, with shining topper poised at breast-level, had delayed his going for an instant’s guarded confabulation with a youngish man conspicuous in this, that he, alone of all that company, was in simple evening dress.

Their backs were toward P. Sybarite, but by the fat pink folds above the back of Respectability’s collar and the fat white side-whiskers adorning his plump pink chops, Beelzebub knew that he encountered for the second time that evening Respectability of the gold-capped cane.

Without the least shame, he paused and cocked sharp ears to catch what he could of the conversation between these two.

Little enough he profited by his open eavesdropping; what he heard was scarcely illuminating when applied to the puzzle that haunted him.

“She won’t—­that’s flat,” Respectability’s companion announced in a sullen voice.

By the tone of this last Beelzebub knew that it issued from an ugly twisted mouth.

“But,” Respectability insisted heavily—­“You’re sure you’ve done your best to persuade her?”