Nigel waited for his luncheon companion in the crowded vestibule of London’s most famous club restaurant.  He was to a certain extent out of the picture among the crowd of this new generation of pleasure seekers, on the faces of whom opulence and acquisitiveness had already laid its branding hand.  The Mecca alike of musical comedy and the Stock Exchange, the place, however, still preserved a curious attraction for the foreign element in London, so that when at last Naida appeared, she was exchanging courtesies with an Italian Duchess on one side and a celebrated Russian dancer on the other.  Nigel led her at once to the table which he had selected in the balcony.

“I have obeyed your wishes to the letter,” he said, “and I think that you are right.  Up here we are entirely alone, and, as you see, they have had the sense to place the tables a long way apart.  Am I to blame, I wonder, for asking you to do so unconventional a thing as to lunch here again alone with me?”

She drew off her gloves and smiled across the table at him.  Her plain, tailor-made gown, with its high collar, was the last word in elegance.  The simplicity of her French hat was to prove the despair of a well-known modiste seated downstairs, who made a sketch of it on the menu and tried in vain to copy it.  Even to Nigel’s exacting taste she was flawless.

“Is it unconventional?” she asked carelessly.  “I do not study those things.  I lunch or dine with a party, generally, because it happens so.  I lunch alone with you because it pleases me.”

“And for this material side of our entertainment?” he enquired, smiling, as he handed her the menu card.

“A grapefruit, a quail with white grapes, and some asparagus,” she replied promptly.  “You see, in one respect I am an easy companion.  I know exactly what I want.  A mixed vermouth, if you like, yes.  And now, tell me your news?”

“There is news,” he announced, “which the whole world will know of before many hours are past.  France has broken her pact with England.”

“It is my opinion,” she said deliberately, “that France has been very patient with you.”

“And mine,” he acknowledged.  “We have now to see what will become of a fat and prosperous country with a semi-obsolete fleet and a comic opera army.”

“Must we talk of serious things?” she asked softly.  “I am weary of the clanking wheels of life.”

He sighed.

“And yet for you,” he said, “they are not grinding out the fate of your country.”

“Nevertheless, I too hear them all the time,” she rejoined.  “And I hate them.  They make one lose one’s sense of proportion.  After all, it is our own individual and internal life which counts.  I can understand Nero fiddling while Rome burned, if he really had no power to call up fire engines.”

“Are you an individualist?” he asked.

“Not fundamentally,” she replied, “but I am caught up in the throes of a great reaction.  I have been studying events, which it is quite true may change the destinies of the world, so intently that I have almost forgotten that, after all, the greatest thing in the world, my world, is the happiness or ill-content of Naida Karetsky.  It is really of more importance to me to-day that my quail should be cooked as I like it than that England has let go her last rope.”