“You’re not going yet, Dickey?” said Mollie, throwing her arm around the other’s waist.

“Ssh!” whispered “Dickey.”  “Inspector Kerry is here!  You don’t want to be called as a witness at nasty inquests and things, do you?”

“Good heavens, my dear, no!  But why should I be?”

“Why should any of us?  But don’t you see they are looking for the people who used to go to Kazmah’s?  It’s in the paper tonight.  We shall all be served with subpoenas.  I’m off!”

Escaping from Mollie’s embrace, the tall girl ran up the stairs, kissing her hand to Bill as she passed.  Mollie hesitated, looking all about the crowded room for Chief Inspector Kerry.  Presently she saw him, standing nearly opposite the stairway, his intolerant blue eyes turning right and left, so that the fierce glance seemed to miss nothing and no one in the room.  Hands thrust in his overcoat pockets and his cane held under his arm, he inspected the place and its occupants as a very aggressive country cousin might inspect the monkey-house at the Zoo.  To Mollie’s intense disappointment he persistently avoided looking in her direction.

Although a popular dance was on the point of commencing, several visitors had suddenly determined to leave.  Kerry pretended to be ignorant of the sensation which his appearance had created, passing slowly along the room and submitting group after group to deliberate scrutiny; but as news flies through an Eastern bazaar the name of the celebrated detective, whose association with London’s latest crime was mentioned by every evening paper in the kingdom, sped now on magic wings, so that there was a muted charivari out of which, in every key from bass to soprano, arose ever and anon the words “Chief Inspector Kerry.”

“It’s perfectly ridiculous but characteristically English,” drawled one young man, standing beside Mollie Gretna, “to send out a bally red-headed policeman in preposterous glad-rags to look for a clever criminal.  Kerry is well known to all the crooks, and nobody could mistake him.  Damn silly—­damn silly!”

As “damn silly” Kerry’s open scrutiny of the members and visitors must have appeared to others, but it was a deliberate policy very popular with the Chief Inspector, and termed by him “beating.”  Possessed of an undisguisable personality, Kerry had found a way of employing his natural physical peculiarities to his professional advantage.  Where other investigators worked in the dark, secretly, Red Kerry sought the limelight—­at the right time.  That every hour lost in getting on the track of the mysterious Kazmah was a point gained by the equally mysterious man from Whitehall he felt assured, and although the elaborate but hidden mechanism of New Scotland Yard was at work seeking out the patrons of the Bond Street drug-shop, Kerry was indisposed to await the result.