This brilliant little shape of life in the dark rectangle of the doorway had been conspicuously one of that party whose forbidding host had excited the aversion of Eve de Montalais and, in himself, half-formed forebodings. The man at whom she was so gayly gurgling over her shoulder, who wore both topper and grin at the doggish slant which becomes the author of an amusingly improper wheeze, was the little chap of the weazened wise mask whom Lanyard privately reckoned court jester to the Sultan of Loot. The latter in very person bulked in the shadowy background provided by the corridor, a presence vast but vague, betrayed by the baleful burning of fire opals as a thunderhead on a summer's night may remain more sensed than seen till a glimmer of lightning lends definition to its loom. Behind lurked a fourth, a figure still more indefinite. And in the rear a gleam picked out the hairless poll of Theodore, inclined at a servile angle.
Discovering Liane Delorme all at once, the lady on the threshold registered rapture, then ran to her with glad hands extended, her slight little body bearing an extravagant wrap of Russian sables with a grace as dainty as a fay's. Lips that didn't need paint to point their pretty contours bubbling joyously—"Darling Liane! You luscious thing! How we've missed you!"—she precipitated herself into Liane's arms and printed inconsiderate kisses upon that studiously composed complexion. When she permitted Liane to disengage and present Lanyard, he received an almost disconcertingly cordial smile and a tiny hand on which blazed in insolent beauty what he rated at first glance the most exquisite emeralds he had ever seen, who in his day had been somewhat an amateur of emeralds.
"Mr. Lanyard!"—Liane's introduction had been effected in English—"I am so glad to know you. It seems to me Liane knows all the interesting people—and nobody else."
"One trusts very truly you will not find need tonight to revise that recommendation," Lanyard returned, bowing low over the little hand. He added with an enquiring inflexion, because he wasn't sure of having caught the name aright: "Mrs. McFee . . ."
"Mrs. Folliott McFee," Liane supplied with an accent on the Folliott that supplemented something to this sense: 'Surely you must know that magic name!'
All the same, Lanyard didn't.
"Folly for short," laughed Mrs. McFee—"Folly to my friends." Then she gave a small make-believe shriek because the sable robe was being lifted from her shoulders by the gentleman of the carven countenance. "Peter Pagan! how you startled me . . . You know Peter Pagan, of course, Mr. Lanyard: everybody does."
"Business of initiating you to the inner circle of certified somebodies, Mr. Lanyard," quoth Mr. Pagan solemnly, shaking hands, and leaving Lanyard with a feeling that no man had a right to look like that if he couldn't extemporize more tellingly.
But Liane had dropped a hand upon his sleeve and was drawing him aside to be made known to the Sultan of Loot.
"Mr. Morphew: Mr. Lanyard . . . You must become good friends, you two who are both such good friends of mine."