And then, pausing for a moment on the top of the steps in order to make sure that there was no one in the street who could recognize her—Queen’s Road was only just round the corner—Lola ran down and put her hand on the door of the taxi cab. “The Savoy,” she said. PART III I Sir Peter Chalfont’s cork arm had become one of the institutions of the town. Long ago the grimness had gone out of everybody’s laughter at the tricks he played with it,—presenting it with the palm the wrong way, making it squeak suddenly and wagging it about from the wrist as a greeting to his friends. Every one had grown accustomed to his frequent changes of gloves and his habit of appearing at dinner with those dreadful stiff fingers in white buckskin. He had indeed trained the thing to perform as though it were an animal and he could do almost anything with it except tie a dress tie. That was beyond him. At quarter to eight on the evening of Lola’s first dip into life, he turned away from the telephone and presented himself to the man who had been his batman during the last year of the War. He had had three since the miracle of the Marne. He was rather bored because he had just been told by the girl who had promised to dine with him that she didn’t feel like eating and he knew that meant that some one else had cropped up who was more amusing than himself. He had a great mind to give the Savoy a wide berth and walk round to Boodles and have dinner with the _Pall Mall Gazette_. But on second thoughts the idea of accompanying his cold salmon and cucumber with the accumulating mass of depressing evidence of the world’s unrest, as set forth in the evening paper, appalled him. Charles was trying to edge his way back into Hungary. The Russian Reds were emptying their poison all over the map. English miners had gone out on strike and with a callousness altogether criminal had left the pumps unmanned. Viviani had landed in the United States to endeavor to prove to the new President that if he did not jerk the Senate out of Main Street he would inevitably sentence Europe to death. And Lloyd George, even to the amazement of those who knew him best, was continuing his game of poker with Lenin and Trotsky.