'I am too poor a devil just now to sneer at his money or position, or, by Jove, I would do so at both. His father was "something" in the city, whatever that means. Let us take the girl from him.'

'All right—I am your man,' exclaimed Hawksleigh.

'He doesn't seem to have even an old woman to play propriety or act chaperon.'

'When did he ever study Mrs. Grundy? But to see such a girl as this with him reminds me of Beauty and the Beast.'

'Her wisdom is no doubt in her dressing-case, and her modesty—well, ah—in her pocket, I suppose. Well, here goes——'

'Stop, don't be too hasty. Ah! the old rip, he doesn't care about acting lotus-eater at Cadbury Court, and so has come abroad with "somebody's luggage." Who can the little girl be?'

'Not much, when she is with him, as I said before,' responded the blasé baronet. 'We'll soon find out. Like the conspirators in a burlesque, who turn up the collars of their coats, we must say, "Let us dissemble!"'

What their precise plans were they perhaps scarcely knew, but half-past ten was announced as the time when, as the programme had it, the curtain was to rise on the Rideau de Séparation de la Scène, et commencement de la Kermesse, when the stage appeared with a landscape and busy groups in peasant costume, showing the whole business of a Flemish fair; the dancing ceased, and an immediate rush towards the proscenium took place from all parts of the saloon, the refreshment-rooms, and adjacent passages.

The Belgians are not famous for their politeness, and many of those present on this occasion were of the bourgeois class; thus when the curtain rose there was instantly a rough, unceremonious, and furious crowding towards the proscenium, and in the crush the hand of Alison was torn from the arm of Cadbury, and they were hopelessly separated by a crowd of more than a thousand persons, tightly wedged together.

So far were they apart that he totally failed to see anything of her or where she was, and nearly an hour elapsed before the follies of the Kermesse were over, and a resumption of the dancing dispersed the crowd about the greater space of the saloon. Immediately on this taking place, Cadbury began a search on every hand, amid all the groups and in all the adjacent rooms and corridors—even between the wings of the now open stage—for Alison, but she was nowhere to be seen.