What the others did, however, did not matter. It was generally understood that they were merely devilish, and no score was to be counted against them. Furniss, on the other hand, played everything for stakes, and his tally had to meet with a reckoning. For, when the lights left their sudden wave of darkness on the mixed and rollicking group, Furniss quietly and modestly followed the promptings of his profession, turned slowly, gathered the nearest woman into his arms, and thoroughly and deliberately kissed her. Who she was he had not the slightest idea, nor did he, indeed, have any very lively curiosity. The act was purely professional, perfectly methodic, as automatic and unemotional as a response in a ritual. Thus, despite Furniss’s known make-up, the fact would have passed unnoticed had it not been for two things, first, that, owing to the deliberateness of Furniss and the quickness of the engineer, the lights went on again before he was through, and the second that the woman thus discovered in his arms was the only one in the room whom he would have had the slightest reason for wanting to kiss. It was a perfect triumph of circumstantial evidence. The sudden hush which fell on the group when the lights were restored at once displayed the awfulness of Furniss’s depravity, as viewed by the Fitchly Country Club, in riot assembled. Had any other man been caught in the same act, with any other woman, there would have been merely a triumphant outcry of self-acknowledged devilishness. The man would have bought at the bar below, and the women would have screamed themselves to their motors; but, by some unusual instinct that was positively primitive, every man and woman in the room realized that Furniss was a professional and his act took a much more vital aspect. By the same perfect precision of instinct not a single iota of blame was attached to the lady in question, for the accurate conception of Furniss on the part of the Country Club demonstrated also that she was only an instrument in a tragedy of the elements. One does not accuse a person of being an accessory to a cyclone. At the vivid and not wholly beautiful picture thus presented by the electrics, the whole room foolishly and utterly unsuccessfully attempted to give an imitation of a gathering which knows that nothing has happened. After the awful hush of the first moment, the women began quietly conversing in tones unusually subdued; the men began skylarking and shouting on subjects unusually hollow. The object of instructing the engineer to turn on the lights again, after midnight, had been to allow the dance to continue until two in the morning. At one there was not a single person left in the ball-room, and the waiters were already sweeping up the fragments. Some fragments, however, they could not sweep, and these make the following prelude: