LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 3

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      CHAPTER THREE

      THE second evening following the printed announcements of the arrival of Lieutenant Keays at the Coast a number of his younger fellow-officers tendered him a quite informal dinner. This dinner, which was served in one of the upper rooms opening off the dancing-floor, was sufficiently convivial in character to attract the attention of casual couples tired of waltzing and fox-trotting to the strains of an orchestra.

      It had been the source of much disappointment to the young stranger from the Brooklyn Navy Yard that Lieutenant-Colonel Diehms had failed to attend this dinner. Yet Wilsnach, keeping his wits about him, did not betray his feelings. For before the evening was over he had the satisfaction of seeing Diehms step into the room where he sat. The last notes of Nights of Gladness had just died away, and to the young Lieutenant-Colonel's arm clung one of the loveliest women that the man from the Paris office had ever had the dubious good luck to behold.

      ​Wilsnach, for all the byplay with those about him, studied her closely, but not so closely as he studied the face of the man with her.

      "I call that an uncommonly beautiful woman," ventured the light-hearted Wilsnach to the officer on his right as he glanced toward the small table to which a silver cooler filled with chopped ice had just been brought. "Who is she?"

      "That's Madame Garnier," answered the man on Wilsnach's right.

      "Then not an American?"

      "No; she's merely spending the winter here."

      "But why here?" blithely persisted Wilsnach.

      "She's rather interested in aviation. They say her husband is Garnier, the French inventor who's getting out that gyroscopic stabilizer for air-craft. She's going to look after the government trials for him."

      Yet as the talk at Wilsnach's crowded table grew louder, and the laughter more convivial, the shadowy-eyed woman with the orange opera-cloak looked more than once in the direction of the newly arrived Lieutenant Keays. From under her dark lashes, from time to time, she might even have been detected studying his well-tailored figure with a not ​altogether impersonal interest. Her companion, it might also have been observed, lapsed more and more into periods of gloomy silence. And if Madame Garnier occasionally spoke at greater length to the young French waiter who attended her table than might seem necessary, and if this waiter showed any undue interest in the neighboring table and its noisy officers, no one outside of the alert-eyed Wilsnach seemed to take notice of the matter.

      When the technicalities of a wordy argument among his confrères warranted Lieutenant Keays in producing certain papers and specifications from his pocket, and he allowed these to pass from hand to hand about the table, a close observer might also have noticed the minutest tightening of Madame Garnier's languorous lips. And when these papers were duly restored to the young lieutenant's possession, and later to his pocket, the woman with the ivory-white skin might have been seen whispering certain information to the gloomy-eyed officer beside her. Then as the glasses were refilled and the noisy talk resumed, Madame Garnier and Diehms left the room.

      When, an hour later, the last toast had been drunk and Keays' last companion had bidden him ​good night, he wandered disconsolately but warily about those suddenly quieted upper regions off the dancing-floor. He wandered erratically yet alertly on, with his heart in his boots, for the sudden fear possessed him that Madame Gamier had retired for the night. Then quite as suddenly he felt his heart come back from his boots to his throat. For as he stepped out of the deserted ballroom he felt his body brushed by the perilous fringes of a golden-orange opera-cloak trimmed with sable. At the same moment a little Watteau-like fan of ivory dropped to the floor.

      He stood staring down at it stupidly. He heard a small coo of startled laughter and an even softer apologetic murmur of regret. He leaned forward unsteadily and groped about on the polished floor, trying, with what appeared to be the ineffectual struggles of inebriacy, to recover the fan.

      The woman at his side laughed a second time, laughed softly and mysteriously, as she stooped and caught it up. Then she crossed the room and passed out through the door into the shadowy darkness of the wide loggia swept by the balmy night sea-breeze.

      Wilsnach, with studiously unsteady steps, made his way toward that same door and stepped out upon ​the same shadowy loggia. There, finding the wide spaces of that balmy-aired veranda unoccupied, he groped his way to a huge rustic chair beside the railing, and after swayingly communing with nature and essaying several fruitless efforts to reform his dangling tie-ends, subsided into a sleep that seemed as untroubled as it was profound.

      Out of the shadowy doorway behind the sleeper stole, a few moments later, the equally shadowy figure of a woman in a golden-orange opera-cloak trimmed with sable. She advanced slowly and noiselessly to the railing, close beside the rustic chair. She turned toward the chair, stood motionless and murmured an almost inaudible sentence or two.

      Her words, however, brought no answer from the recumbent figure with the straggling tie-ends. So the woman looked quietly about, stepped closer to the sleeping man and stooped over him.

      A tingling of nerves needled through Wilsnach's cramped body as he felt the touch of that white hand. The fingers slipped like a snake in under his coat, but he neither moved nor lifted an eyelid. He was conscious of the fact that the woman's breath was fanning warmly at his face, that he lay within the aura of some soft and voluptuous aroma, that ​there was something perversely appealing about the very nearness of that perfumed body, no matter what mission had brought it so close to his own. He could still feel the slender fingers feeling exploringly about under his coat.

      He could hear her quiet little gasp of relief as they closed on the packet of papers which he carried there. And he was conscious of her complete suspension of breath as the hand, still holding his papers,

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