Of course, if there were a girl in the house, the police would have found her.  But—­there was something queer.  He meant to have it all out with Logan when the police were gone.  Meantime, however, he behaved loyally and stood up to leave the table clear while one of the detectives did actually bend down to peer under it.  As the policeman stooped Peter mechanically pulled the chair back, and doing so he caught sight of a thin blue streak lying, like solidified cigarette smoke, across the red brocade cushion.  In this smoke-blue streak there were little things that glistened—­little silver things shaped like crescent moons set at regular intervals from each other.  Peter had been unconsciously sitting on the smoke wreath, and as the policeman rose he deliberately sat down on it again.  He felt suddenly sick, and his heart was large and cold in his breast, where it did not beat, but floundered like a caught fish.

CHAPTER XXII

THE FRAGRANCE OF FRESIAS

Winifred Child had been in this house, or else she had sold or given the Moon dress to another girl who had been here.

Thoughts were flashing through Peter’s brain with the sharp quickness of motion pictures following one another to a far conclusion.  Of the girl he could not be sure.  The lost dryad, needing money more than she needed a smart evening gown, might well have disposed of Ena’s gift.  And yet Petro had—­strangely enough it had seemed to him then—­thought of Winifred and the mysterious “dryad door” on the Monarchic the moment he came into this place.

The perfume of the mirror room was here—­the perfume which made all Nadine’s model dresses delicately fragrant of spring flowers; fresias, the youngest dryad had said they were; and since then Peter had asked for fresias at the florist’s, requested the Scottish head gardener to plant fresias in the garden, and had kept fresias in his room to call back old dreams.  If the dryad had sold her dress, would the fresia fragrance haunt it still?  Petro thought not.  The other woman would have given it her own special perfume.  Only in the possession of a dryad would it have retained this scent.

Winifred Child had been here, then—­in Logan’s dining-room, near Logan’s table laid so alluringly for a supper en tete-a-tete!

This idea, passing through several phases, had shaped itself clearly in Peter Rolls’s mind by the time the policeman’s round black head had come up from under the table.  And it was because of the idea that he sat down deliberately on the film of chiffon.  He did not want questions to be asked, or Winifred Child’s name to be mentioned in this business, at all events, until he had made up his mind what to do.

There was still time to make it up, and speak, if necessary while the detectives were on the spot, for Logan had offered them champagne and they had accepted now they were sure that all parties had been victimized by a practical joker.  “Girls’ drink” was not for the guardians of New York, and Sims was opening two frosty-looking bottles of the “real thing” just produced from some household iceberg The men would not go for several moments yet.