Isabel Joy rose and glanced at the watch in her bracelet; then followed the direction of the male hand, and vanished. Rentoul Smiles turned instantly to the other doorway. "How do, Rent?" said Seven Sachs, coming forward. "How do, Seven?" Mr. Rentoul Smiles winked. "This is my good friend, Alderman Machin, the theatre-manager from London." "Glad to meet you, sir." "She’s not gone, has she?" asked Sachs hurriedly. "No, my housekeeper wanted to talk to her. Come along." And in the waiting room, full of permanent examples of the results of Mr. Rentoul Smiles’s spiritual attitude toward his fellow men, Edward Henry was presented to Isabel Joy. The next instant the two men and the housekeeper had unobtrusively retired, and he was alone with his objective. In truth Seven Sachs was a notable organiser. III. She was sitting down in a cosy-corner, her feet on a footstool, and she seemed a negligible physical quantity as he stood in front of her. This was she who had worsted the entire judicial and police system of Chicago, who spoke pentecostal tongues, who had circled the globe, and held enthralled--so journalists computed--more than a quarter of a million of the inhabitants of Marseilles, Athens, Port Said, Candy, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Tokio, Hawaii, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, and lastly New York! This was she! "I understand we’re going home on the same ship!" he was saying. She looked up at him, almost appealingly. "You won’t see anything of me, though," she said. "Why not?" "Tell me," said she, not answering his question. "What do they say of me, really, in England? I don’t mean the newspapers. For instance, the Azure Society. Do you know of it?" He nodded. "Tell me," she repeated. He related the episode of the telegram at the private first performance of "The Orient Pearl." She burst out, in a torrent of irrelevant protest: "The New York police have not treated me right. It would have cost them nothing to arrest me and let me go. But they wouldn’t. Every man in the force--you hear me, every man--has had strict orders to leave me unmolested. It seems they resent my dealings with the police in Chicago, where I brought about the dismissal of four officers, so they say. And so I’m to be boycotted in this manner! Is that argument, Mr. Machin? Tell me. You’re a man, but honestly, is it argument? Why, it’s just as mean and despicable as brute force." "I agree with you," said Edward Henry softly.