He had risen with a bow that was neither exaggerated nor curt. There was undeniable power in his face, boyish and weak as it was in its unrestraint, like a flame spurting fiercely on a trembling wick. He brought to men a little sense of fear--never to women. To-day this intensity seemed clouded, not fully awake as if there were still dinning in his ears the echoes of the night before. The dullest observer, looking on his face, would have seen where he was riding. In his own club (where he was adored) bets were up that he would not last the year. Presently he leaned toward her and said, protected by the shrieks of laughter that surrounded De Joncy: "Don't you think you were in the wrong? What right had you to come here?" She understood that Busby had betrayed her to him and to Harrigan Blood. "Even if I were a--" she gave a glance up the table, "you should make a difference between a woman and a--bottle!" "You are quite right," he said, after a moment. "Will you accept my apologies? I am seldom discourteous to a woman--never intentionally." She looked at him, and saw with what an effort he spoke, his brain on fire, yet making no mistake in the precision of his words. She nodded, and turned again to Harrigan Blood, all her nature aroused to opposition at this weakness in such a man. Yet ordinarily her sympathies were quick. "You are too hard on him," said Harrigan Blood, who had listened. "It's gone too far; he can't help it. He's got his coffin strapped to his back." "Why doesn't some one help him?" she said irritably. Blood shrugged his shoulders, answering with the superiority of the self-made man before the misfortune of the friend who has thrown everything away: "Help him? There's your feminism again! The world's turned crazy on sentimentalized charity! Charity is nothing but a confession of failure! Build up! Let derelicts go! Save him? For what? In New York? We are too busy. The best that can be said is, he's drinking himself to death like a gentleman--doing it royally! His self-control's a miracle--some day there'll be an explosion! If you knew his history--" "What is his story?" As Blood was about to begin it, he was interrupted by a general pushing back of chairs. Busby, at the piano, flung out the chords of the sextette that had made a mediocre opera famous. Half the party crowded, laughing and bantering, to render the chorus, the Comte de Joncy insisting on being taught the latest curious American dance. Tenafly entered to see to the clearing of the room. He was the type of the valet ennobled, a mask of incomparable vacuity, a secret smile that missed nothing, internal rather than outward, yet still chained to the servant's habit of picking up his feet. Sassoon summoned him with a nod which Tenafly perceived instantly across the room. "The little girl in yellow--who is she?" The eye of the restaurateur passed vaguely over the company, but the instant sufficed to photograph each detail.