“I should like to talk to you seriously. There are many men I have known longer, but none I could sooner trust. Yet in this matter somehow I don’t feel…” “Yes?” I prompted. “Well, I don’t feel quite at liberty to discuss it with you.” There was a silence that might have been awkward. O’Shea was watching me almost pathetically; and: “I know what you want to talk about,” I said. “Nanette is a witch. But there is only one man in the world for her now. It might be fair, though, to give her a year to think it over.” “You don’t doubt _my_ attitude in the matter,” O’Shea murmured. “No,” I replied, “I know it.” He looked at me very fixedly, when: “Coo-ooh!” I heard. O’Shea’s expression changed; and, turning, I crossed to an open window, looking down into the street. Standing just in front of the ladder which disfigured the front of the premises, was Nanette, staring upward. A two-seater with several people in it stood at the curb. “Hello, Nanette,” I called. “Saw your light,” she shouted, “as we were passing. May we come up, or are you going to bed?” “No,” I replied, and hesitated to tell her what I knew she hoped. “Come right up and bring your friends. I have only just got in.” “Right-oh!” she cried. CHAPTER XXIX. ADOLPH ZARA The party that presently invaded us proved to consist of Nanette and a brunette girl friend whom I had not seen before. They were escorted by a young medical officer on leave from Mesopotamia--a very charming type of Scotsman--and Milton, one of Nanette’s Madeira conquests, whom, you may recall, I had met again recently under rather odd circumstances. I thought that this evening was probably his reward for the weary job of scouting that he had performed on that occasion. He was not a happy man. The fact was beginning to dawn upon him that at the Savoy, the Hippodrome, and wherever else they had gone, he had been wasting his fragrance on the desert air. I pictured him driving to my apartment as one consciously heading for his doom. The poor fellow was rather pathetically young, and, regarding every acquaintance of Nanette’s as a serious rival, he had awakened to the fact that he had three score or so of deadly enemies in London. Presently: “Whisky and soda?” said I; “or have you reached the Bass stage?” “Neither, thanks,” he returned, and glared around my modest bachelor apartment as one who finds himself in the chamber of Bluebeard. Nanette had sped to O’Shea like an arrow to its target. As I turned aside from the peevish Milton, “I hadn’t dared to hope I should see you again to-night,” I heard her say. The other man and the pretty brunette were jointly occupying my most comfortable armchair, therefore, conquering a perfectly stupid pique which Milton had inspired: “Well,” said I, holding out my cigarette case, “we seem to have no alternative but to--look on, Milton.”