Lewin Rodwell smiled inwardly at them all, sipped the cup of China tea offered him by a slim, dark-haired, loosely-clad girl who secretly regarded him as a hero, and then talked loudly, airing his opinion of "what the Government really ought to do." To him, the huge farce was amusing. Lady Betty was, of course, "a good sort," but he knew quite well that her association with the Anti-Teuton movement was merely for the sake of advertisement and notoriety--in order to go one better than the Countess of Chesterbridge, who had, for years, been her rival on the face of the social barometer--which, after all, was the personal columns of the daily newspapers. After an hour, when most of the guests had left, Rodwell rose at last and said to Trustram, with whom he had had a long and very intimate chat: "I really do wish you'd run in and see me, Mr Trustram. I'd be so awfully delighted. I'm sure we can do something together in order to expose this terrible scandal. Will you?" "Most certainly. I'll be most pleased." "Good. Can't you dine with me--say on Tuesday?" His newly-found friend reflected a moment, and then replied in the affirmative. "Excellent. Tuesday at eight--eh? You know my address." "Yes--in Bruton Street." "Right--that's an appointment," Rodwell exclaimed cheerily; and then, after bending low over Lady Betty's thin white hand, he left. CHAPTER TWO. THE SUSPICIONS OF ELISE. At nine o'clock that same evening, in a well-furnished drawing-room half-way up Fitzjohn's Avenue, in Hampstead, a pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired girl of twenty-one sat at the piano alone, playing a gay French chanson, to pass away the time. Dressed in a dainty little dinner-gown of carnation pink, and wearing in her well-dressed hair a touch of velvet to match, she presented a pretty picture beneath the shaded electric-light which fell over the instrument set in a corner. Her mother, Mrs Shearman, a charming, grey-haired lady, had just gone out, while her father, Daniel Shearman, a rich tool-manufacturer, whose works were outside Birmingham, was away at the factory, as was his habit three days each week. Elise Shearman was just a typical athletic English girl. In her early youth her parents were "making their way in the world," but at fourteen she had been sent abroad to school, first to Lausanne, and afterwards to Dresden, where she had studied music, as so many English girls have done.