All of which brings me to the ungallant confession that the two ladies, who had occupied so much of an idle man’s thoughts at Mentone, occupied considerably less of a busy man’s at Paris. They were not forgotten, but they receded into the background of my thoughts, emerging to the forefront only in rare moments of leisure; even then my mental attitude was one of greater detachment. I had a cold fit about the situation, and some ungracious reflections for both of them. Absence and preoccupation blunted my imagination, even when they did not entirely divert my thoughts. My mind was localized; it did not travel far or for long outside my daily business. It was when our deliberations had almost reached a conclusion, as the official report put it—when our agreement had gone to the secretaries to be drafted in proper form—that I got a telegram from Godfrey Frost, telling me that he would be in Paris the next day and asking me to dine with him. Putting off some minor engagement which I had, I accepted his invitation. It was not till after dinner, when we were alone in his sitting room at the hotel, that he opened to me what he had to say. He did it in a methodical, deliberate way. “I’ve something to say to you. Sit down there, and light a cigar, Julius.” I obeyed him. Evidently I was in for a story—of what sort I did not know. But his mouth wore its resolute look, not the smile with which he had chaffed me after our meeting with Arsenio Valdez at Monte Carlo. “The system worked,” he began abruptly. “You won?” I asked, astonished.