Under the brilliant electric lights which gleamed upon the marble he saw little groups of people—each group seeming quite small in the immensity—talking earnestly together.
As he came out among them every head was turned, though of Ethel and her mother he saw not a trace.
But as he went to the cloak-room, and delivered his metal ticket, two or three commissionaires came up to him with awed and respectful faces.
"That young lady?" he said, "and the elder one with her?"
"It was nothing, monsieur," one of the men hastened to say. "They are two English ladies staying at the pension in the Rue Grimaldi. Your success, monsieur, unnerved them. They have been sent home in a voiture."
Basil nodded as he was helped into his long, dark coat.
With a smile he distributed a few gold coins, and then, alone, unattended, he walked out into the warm, aromatic night, and strolled to his adjacent hotel among flower-bordered paths, under the twin lights of electricity and the great, red moon of the South.
At the Hôtel de Paris, at the Métropole, at Ciro's, people were gathering for gay supper parties.
As he entered the huge, brilliantly decorated lounge of the Malmaison, groups of wealthy people were smoking a preliminary cigarette before supper. Some of them—many of them—recognised him, and nodded and whispered to each other, but he entered the lift and went straight to his own room.
He turned up the electric lights, and locked the door. And then, from pocket and pocket, he poured out crackling, crumpled heaps of notes, heavy handfuls of gold—the wealth of which he had dreamed.