He wheeled round and marched off, and as he passed beneath the windows of the Randolph Hotel he drew up short for a moment and with a touch of knightliness which was quite unself-conscious he bared his head beneath the window of the room in which he believed that Betty was to sleep, but which, as a matter of fact, harboured a short, fat, wheezy Anglo-Indian with a head as bald as a billiard ball. Kenyon disguised his annoyance under an air of characteristic imperturbability. "Well, that's our Peter to the life," he said, taking Graham's eager arm. "He's a sort of Don Quixote--a very pure and perfect person. One of these days he's likely to come an unholy cropper, and that's to my way of thinking what he most needs. I don't agree with a man's being a total abstainer in anything. It narrows him and makes him provincial. Then, too, a man who fancies himself as better than his fellows is apt to wear a halo under his hat, and that disgusting trick ruins friendship and leads to a hasty and ill-considered marriage with the first good actress who catches him on the hop and makes use of his lamentable ignorance. Come along, brother, we'll see life together." "Fine!" said Graham. "Me for life all the time." So these two,--the one curiously old and the other dangerously young,--made their way to the stage door of the Theatre Royal and waited among the little crowd of undergraduates for the moment when the ladies of the chorus should have retouched their make-up and be ready for further theatricalisms. Lottie Lawrence and Billy Seymour were the first out. The latter's greeting was exuberant. "What-ho, Nick! Where's the blooming giant you said you were going to bring?" "Otherwise engaged, dear Billy; but permit me to introduce to you a financial magnate from the golden city of New York." Billy was young and slim and so tight-skirted that her walk was almost like that of a Chinese Princess. Even under the modest light of the stage door-keeper's box her lips gleamed crimsonly and her long eyelashes stuck out separately in black surprise. Her small round face was plastered thickly with powder. She was very alluring to the very young. Her friend had come from an exactly similar mould and might have been a twin but for her manner, which was that of the violet--the modest violet--on a river's brim. Kenyon hailed a cab, gave the man the address in Wellington Square and sat himself between the two girls, with an arm round each. Billy Seymour had taken in Graham with one expert glance of minute examination. "Graham Guthrie, eh?" she said. "It smacks of Caledonia, bag-pipes and the braes and banks o' bonnie Doon. I take it your ancestors went over on the S. S. Mayflower, of the White Star Line--that gigantic vessel which followed the beckoning finger of Columbus--and started the race which invented sky-scrapers and the cuspidors."