“You are not far wrong,” he said dryly. “But you have lived so much abroad that you forget the propriety due to the British hansom. If you wave your arms so excitedly, the policeman at the top of St. James’ Street will stop us, and I shall be compelled to magnetize him.” “Could you?” I inquired irrelevantly. “Ask the guv’nor what I did to the _douanier_ at the Gare du Nord who wished to confiscate a pound of the only tobacco the old man can smoke. I made him chalk a whole ship-load of luggage like an automaton. I have progressed somewhat since I left Oxford. Were it not for other less agreeable features, I could get a fair amount of amusement out of my powers of suggestion. It is not altogether puzzling when you come to reason it out. Granted that I am a sort of human magnet, I must obviously be able to control my fellow-men, especially those who are most susceptible to external influences.” “When I extricate Maggie and you from your present dilemma I shall demand your aid for the utter squelching and making everlastingly ridiculous of some of my dearest enemies,” I said cheerfully. “Better use me soon,” said he lightly, yet there was a chilling and somber significance in his words that recalled me to the reality of the peril of which he spoke so jestingly. When we reached Lord Sandilands’ town house our cab took rank behind a score of broughams and other conveyances setting down guests at the striped canvas alley which shut off the sacred portal of fashion from the vulgar gaze. _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_: “I hate the common rabble and keep it at a distance,” wrote Horace, who must have lived in the Berkeley Square of Old Rome. What stern barriers are those strips of canvas and lengths of red carpet. We passed several gorgeous footmen (it is an old phrase, but the truth is ever thus) and two detectives, deposited our hats and coats somewhere, made our way up a flight of broad stairs, and my inquisitive eyes fell on a very handsome young woman, exquisitely dressed, but a trifle on the heavy side of the scale to my thinking, whose position, no less than the equal delight with which she welcomed all comers, proclaimed that this was the hostess, Nora Cazenove. The conventional smile flew from her face as painted scenes grow mawkish in sunlight when she saw Karl. She blushed very prettily, and her very soul leaped to her eyes. “I have been looking for you this hour or more,” she cried, and I half expected her to throw her splendid arms around his neck. “I would have been here sooner were I not detained by the unexpected arrival of an old friend. Let me present him.” She extended her hand to me. “The older the friend of Karl’s the more pleased I am to see him,” she said. “And now that I have met you I can only wonder that any friendship could have resisted the strain he must have felt during the last hour.”