Suddenly he recollected going over the house before its completion with Jim Wycherly, who had been his own architect, and the memory of a certain peculiarity in the construction of the ball-room flashed into his mind. The only possible explanation for her disappearance was that somebody had pointed out to her the low door behind the third pillar, and she was now in the gilded swallow's-nest aloft. It was a whim of Wycherly--this concealed stair--he recalled it perfectly now--and, parting the living tapestry of blossoms, he laid his hand on the ivory and gilded paneling, pressing the heart of one carved rose after another, until with a click! a tiny door swung inward, revealing a narrow spiral of stairs, lighted rosily by electricity. He stepped inside, closed the door, and listened, then mounted noiselessly. Half way up he caught the aroma of a cigarette; and, a second later he stepped out onto a tiny latticed balcony, completely screened. The golden dancer, who evidently had been gazing down on the carnival scene below from behind the lattice, whirled around to confront him in a little flurry of cigarette smoke. For a moment they faced each other, then: "How did you know where to find me, Harlequin?" "I'd have died if I hadn't found you, fairest, loveliest----" "That is no answer! Answer me!" "Why did you flee?" he asked. "Answer that, first." She glanced at her cigarette and shrugged her shoulders: "You see why I fled, don't you? Now answer me." The Harlequin presented the hilt of his sword which was set with a tiny mirror. "You see why I fled after you," he said, "don't you?" "All the same," she insisted, smilingly, "I have been informed on excellent authority that I am the only one, except the family, who knows of this balcony. And here comes a Harlequin blundering in! _You_ are not Mr. Wycherly; and you're certainly not Molly." "Alas! My ultimate ends are not as shapely." "Then who are you?" She added, laughing: "They're shapely enough, too." "I am only a poor wandering, love-smitten Harlequin--" he said, "scorned, despised, and mocked by beauty----" "Love-smitten?" she repeated. "Can you doubt it, now?" She laughed gaily and leaned back against the balcony's velvet rail: "You lose no time in declaring yourself, do you, Harlequin?--that is, if you are hinting that _I_ have smitten you with the pretty passion." "Through and through, beautiful dancer----" "How do you know that I am beautiful under this mask?" "I know many things. That's my compensation for being only a poor mountebank of a Harlequin--magic penetration--the clairvoyance of radium." "Did you expect to find _me_ at the top of those cork-screw stairs?" "I did." "Why?"