The drawing-room was on the first floor, and although the stairs leading up to it were somewhat narrow, Mrs. Smith carried out the illusion of a Foreign Office reception by receiving her guests on the first landing with her back to the bathroom door, and handing them over, as they squeezed past, to an ill-fitted butler, who conducted them the three or four paces which separated the end of stairs from the beginning of drawing-room. She boasted that she never forgot names, and was wont to cite herself and King Edward as twin souls in this respect. Indeed, from time to time, she found many startling phases of resemblance between herself and various members of the Royal Family. The tiny drawing-room was uncomfortably crowded. Tillizinni found himself wondering, as he pushed his way through the press, by what extraordinary manœuvre Mrs. Smith held and attracted such a large and representative body of good-looking young men. He had a lurking suspicion that as fast as they entered the drawing-room by the door they surreptitiously escaped through the window. There was that air of unreality which is frequently to be found in the small drawing-rooms of the people bitten by the social bug. “She called me Mr. Tinker,” said Talham’s voice in the other’s ear. His words almost trembled with chagrin. Tillizinni tried to appease him. “She called me Phillips,” he said with a smile; “though that is not my name as far as I know. You must allow for lapses in the memory of a hostess who probably entertains thousands of people in a year.” Talham was silent, but he was very annoyed indeed. The press was thickest at one end of the drawing-room, and to this the two made, following the instinct which invariably draws man to man--for men like men in crowds. “What is the attraction?” grumbled Talham. “Is it not lamentable,” he went on without waiting for a reply, which, as a matter of fact, the detective was not prepared to offer, “that with all the joyous and bountiful gifts which nature has prepared and laid open for her children, men should be found who prefer the hot and fetid atmosphere of a drawing-room and the stimulations of artificial gaiety to that ante-chamber of heaven, the field? Does not the pettiness--the inconclusiveness--of it, strike you? Think of the futility of effort----” He got so far and was warming to his subject, when the little crowd which stood between them and the attraction, thinned, as a sea-fret thins before a westerly wind, and Tillizinni saw, for the first time in his life, Yvonne Yale. She was standing near the fireplace, listening to a short youth by her side, with some evidence of boredom. Her hair, perfectly coiffeured, was a mass of golden brown. About this she wore a little bandeau of dull gold.