“Why, little Winnie French—she found me out at once—has been looking all through the card rooms for “Dear Mrs. Follingsbee.”” And the jolly lawyer laughs anew.
“Mr. Follingsbee,”—Stanhope has ceased to jest, and speaks with his usual business brusqueness—“Mrs. Warburton, I don’t know for what reason, wished to be informed when I left the house. Will you tell her I am about to go, and that I will let her hear from me further through you? I will go up to the dressing room floor, and wait in the boudoir until you have seen her.”
The boudoir opening upon the ladies’ dressing rooms, is untenanted. But from the inner room, Stanhope catches the hum of feminine voices, and in a moment a quartette of ladies come forth, adjusting their masks as they move toward the stairway.
Suddenly there is a little exclamation of delight, and our detective, standing near the open window, with his face turned from the group, feels himself clasped by a pair of pretty dimpled arms, while a gay voice says in his ear:
“Oh! you dear old thing! Have I found you at last? Follingsbee, you look stunning in that costume. Oh!—” as Stanhope draws back with a deprecating gesture—“you needn’t deny your identity: isn’t Mr. Follingsbee here as Uncle Sam? I found him out at once, and didn’t Leslie and I see you enter together?”
Stanhope quakes inwardly, and the perspiration starts out under his mask. It is very delightful, under most circumstances, to be embraced by a pair of soft feminine arms, but just now it is very embarrassing and—very ridiculous.
Divided between his desire to laugh and his wish to run away, the detective stands hesitating, while Winnie French, for she it is, begins a critical examination of his costume.
“Don’t you think the dress muffles your figure a little too much, Follingsbee? If it were snugger here,”—giving him a little poke underneath his elbows,—“and not so straight from the shoulders. Why didn’t you shorten it in front, and wear pointed shoes?”
And she seizes the flowing drapery, and draws it back to illustrate her suggestion.
Again Stanhope recoils with a gesture which the gay girl misinterprets, and, quite ignoring the persistent silence of the supposed Mrs. Follingsbee, she chatters on: