Theodore Drost was about fifty-five, a keen, active man whose countenance, upon critical examination, would have been found to be curiously refined, intelligent, and well preserved. Yet he was shabbily dressed, his long black clerical coat shiny with wear, in contrast with the way in which his daughter--in her fine furs and clothes of the latest mode--was attired. But the father, in all grades of life, is usually shabby, while his daughter--whatever be her profession--looks smart, be it the smartness of Walworth or that of Worth. As his friend, Ernst Ortmann, had whispered those warning words he had glanced across at her, and noting how gaily she was laughing with her two male friends, a cigarette between her pretty lips, he frowned. Then he looked over to the man who had thus urged discretion. The pair were seated at a table, upon which was a red-bordered cloth, whereon stood two half-emptied "bocks" of that light beer so dear to the Teuton palate. They called it "Danish beer," not to offend English customers. The girl whose smiles they were watching was distinctly pretty. She was about twenty-two, with a sweet, eminently English-looking face, fair and quite in contrast with the decidedly foreign, beetle-browed features of the two leering loafers with whom she sat laughing. Theodore Drost, to do him justice, was devoted to his daughter, who, because of her childish aptitude, had become a dancer on the lowest level of the variety stage, a touring company which visited fifth-rate towns. Yet, owing to her discovered talent, she had at last graduated through the hard school of the Lancashire "halls," to what is known as the "syndicate halls" of London. From a demure child-dancer at an obscure music-hall in the outer suburbs, she had become a noted revue artiste, a splendid dancer, who commanded the services of her own press-agent, who in turn commanded half-a-dozen lines in most of the London morning papers, both her prestige and increased salary following in consequence. The British public so little suspect the insidious influence of the press-agent in the formation of modern genius. The press-agent has, in the past, made many a mediocre fool into a Birthday Baronet, or a "paid-for Knight," and more than one has been employed in the service of a Cabinet Minister. Oh what sheep we are, and how easily we are led astray! On that wintry night, Ella Drost--known to the theatre-going public as Stella Steele, the great revue artiste whose picture postcards were everywhere--sat in that stuffy, dingy little restaurant in Soho, sipping a glass of its pseudo-Danish lager, and laughing with the two unpresentable men before her. Outside the unpretentious little place was written up the single word "Restaurant." Its proprietor a big, full-blooded, fair-bearded son of the Fatherland, had kept it for twenty years, and it had been the evening rendezvous of working-class Germans--waiters, bakers, clerks, coiffeurs, jewellers, and such-like.