She declined the paper with a gesture of her white hand.  “No, I’d rather talk; which means that you are to talk and I’m to listen:  will it exhaust you too much to tell me where the rest of the people are?  I left a party in the breakfast-room squabbling over the problem how to kill time; but where are the others?  My father, for instance?”

“He is in the library with Baron Wirsch, Mr. Griffenberg, and the other financiers.  They are doubtless engaged in some mystic rites connected with the worship of the Golden Calf, rites in which the words ‘shares,’ ‘stocks,’ ‘diamonds,’ ‘concessions,’ appear at frequent intervals.  I suppose your father, having joined them, is a member of the all-powerful sect of money-worshippers.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose so.  And Mr. Orme—­is he one of them?” she asked, with elaborate indifference.

Howard smiled cynically.

“Stafford!  No; all that he knows about money is the art of spending it; and what he doesn’t know about that isn’t worth knowing.  It slips through his fingers like water through a sieve; and one of those mysteries which burden my existence is, how he always manages to have some for a friend up a tree.”

“Is he so generous, then?” she asked, with a delicate yawn behind her hand.

Howard nodded, and was silent for a moment, then he said musingly: 

“You’ve got on my favorite subject—­Stafford—­Miss Falconer.  And I warn you that if I go on I shall bore you.”

“Well, I can get up and go away,” she said, languidly.  “He is a friend of yours, I suppose?  By the way, did you know that he stopped those ridiculous horses last night and probably saved my life?”

“For goodness sake don’t let him hear you say that, or even guess that you think it,” he said, with an affectation of alarm.  “Stafford would be inexpressibly annoyed.  He hates a fuss even more than most Englishmen, and would take it very unkindly if you didn’t let a little thing like that pass unnoticed.  Oh, yes, I am his greatest friend.  I don’t think”—­slowly and contemplatively—­“that there is anything he wouldn’t do for me or anything I wouldn’t do for him—­excepting get up early—­go out in the rain—­Oh, it isn’t true!  I’m only bragging,” he broke off, with a groan.  “I’ve done both and shall do them whenever he wants me to.  I’m a poor creature, Miss Falconer.”  “A martyr on the altar of friendship,” she said.  “Mr. Orme must be very irresistible.”

“He is,” he assented, with an air of profound melancholy.  “Stafford has the extremely unpleasant knack of getting everybody to do what he wants.  It’s very disgusting, but it’s true.  That is why he is so general a favourite.  Why, if you walk into any drawing-room and asked who was the most popular man in London, the immediate and unanimous reply would be ‘Stafford Orme.’”

She settled the cushions a little more comfortably.

“You mean amongst men?” she said.