"There will be no need for you to stint yourself. What is more, you will have no duties whatever to perform!"
John lifted his eyebrows in genuine surprise.
"I don't quite see what help I can be in that case!"
"We are hoping that the matter will resolve itself," said Cherriton.
"Yes—yes!" intervened Manners, "everything will resolve itself beautifully. All you have to do now, my dear boy, is to say that you accept the——"
"The invitation," intercepted Cherriton.
John thought there was nothing easier in the world than to accept an invitation to stay, free of expense, at a first-class hotel, and with no duties to perform. He said as much to Manners, and two nights later found him the occupant of the room 1046, a delightful Louis Seize bedroom overlooking the Embankment. He had spent a day and a night at the hotel, and no incident whatever had occurred. On the evening of the second night, however, after dinner, John seated himself in the foyer and ordered coffee and cigarettes.
Presently, in the great crowd moving, laughing and talking near him, John observed a politician who at various periods in the past had loomed importantly in the public eye.
"He is even more ugly than his photographs," thought John, watching the important personage move among his friends. John did not like Beecher Monmouth's smile; altogether he disliked the man on the instant, and was the more astonished to notice that a strikingly beautiful woman of thirty, wearing a glittering diamond necklace and diamond ear-rings, moved towards him and slipped her arm through his. The woman wore a deeply decollété evening dress of a shimmering silk that looked to John now green and now blue. He noticed her flash a smile into Beecher Monmouth's face. He saw the politician put her hand into his. Then recollection came to John. The woman was Beecher Monmouth's wife, a beautiful woman thirty years his junior, who had appeared from nowhere and married him.
"She certainly is a beautiful woman," thought John. "A case of Beauty and the Beast!"