CHAPTER XVIII.
FAIR EXCHANGE IS NO ROBBERY.
At eleven o'clock that night, the electric door-bell of Radwalader's apartment gave two short staccato chirps and then a prolonged whir. At the sound he looked up sharply from his evening mail, and drew his eyebrows together in a puzzled frown.
"At this hour?" he said to himself, and then, closing the doors of La Boîte behind him, went out to answer the summons.
Mirabelle entered deliberately, passing before him into the salon, and shredding a little note in her slender fingers.
"There's no need of this now," she explained, scattering the pieces in the empty fireplace. "It was merely to ask you to call to-morrow. I'd have mailed it if I'd not found you at home."
She flung back her light wrap as she spoke, disclosing a superb evening gown, and a profusion of diamonds slightly on the safe side of undue ostentation. Withal, she had a nice sense of fitness in the matter of dress. It was a safety-valve not possessed by many of her monde, and which, at all times, guaranteed her against exploding into vulgarity.
"I confess," said Radwalader, "that I was surprised when I recognized your ring. Of late, your visits have been so infrequent that when I'm favoured with one at this—to say the least—unconventional hour, I'm sure that its object is of some importance."
Mirabelle looked at him coolly, with a slightly contemptuous droop of her eyelids.
"I believe that it's a characteristic of both the visits I make and those I receive," she said lazily, "that they're seldom without an object. As for the hour, I'm not to be judged by the conventionality for which you manifest so commendable—and so abrupt—a concern. We Parisians are like our allies, the Russians: we go by standards of time which differ from those of the rest of the world. May I sit down?"