Denzil had left that morning for England, or he would have had the disagreeable experience of meeting his _soi-disant_ cousin, to whom he had applied the epithet "toad." For Ferdinand Ardayre had just reached the gay city from Constantinople, and had also come to the ball with a friend in the Turkish Embassy. He happened to be standing at the door when the Boleskis were announced, and his light eyes devoured Harietta--she seemed to him the ideal of things feminine--and he immediately took steps to be presented. Assurance was one of his strongest cards. He was a fair man--with the fairness of a Turk not European--and there was something mean and chetive in his regard. He would have looked over-dressed and un-English in a London ball-room, but in that cosmopolitan company he was unremarkable. He had been his mother's idol and Sir James had left him everything he could scrape from his highly mortgaged property. But certain tastes of his own made a Continental life more congenial to him, and he had chosen early to enter a financial house which took him to the East and Constantinople. He was about twenty-seven years old at this period and was considered by himself and a number of women to be a creature of superlative charm. The one burning bitterness in his spirit was the knowledge that Sir John Ardayre had never recognised him as a brother. During Sir James' lifetime there had been silence upon the matter, since John had no legal reason for denying the relationship, but once he had become master of Ardayre he had let it be known that he refused to believe Ferdinand to be his father's son. On the rare occasions when he had to be mentioned, John called him "the mongrel" and Ferdinand was aware of this. A silent, intense hatred filled his being--more than shared by his mother who, until the day of her death, two years before, had always plotted vengeance--without being able to accomplish anything. Either mother or son would willingly have murdered John if a suitable and safe method had presented itself. And now to know that John had married a beautiful far-off cousin and might have children, and so forever preclude the possibility of his--Ferdinand's--own inheritance of Ardayre was a further incentive to hate! If only some means could be discovered to remove John, and soon! But while Ferdinand thought these things, watching his so-called brother from across the room, he knew that he was impotent. Poisons and daggers were not weapons which could be employed in civilised Paris in the twentieth century! If they would only come to Constantinople! Amaryllis Ardayre had never seen a Paris ball before. She was enchanted. The sumptuous, lofty rooms, with their perfect Louis XV gilt _boiseries_, the marvellous clothes of the women, the gaiety in the air! She was accustomed to the new weird dances in England, but had not seen them performed as she now saw them.