“What have you got to do?”

“One or two friends of mine who preside in the Temple of Chance yonder.  Oh, don’t assume that babyish pout!  I’ve won enough back to keep going for the balance of the time we remain.”

Portlaw, pleased and relieved, finished his claret.

“You’ve a few ladies to take leave of, also,” he said briskly.

“Really, Portlaw!”—­in gentle admonition.

“Haw!  Haw!” roared Portlaw, startling the entire cafe; “you’d better get busy.  There’ll be a run on the bank.  There’ll be a waiting line before Malcourt & Co. opens for business, each fair penitent with her little I.O.U. to be cashed!  Haw!  Haw!  Sad dog!  Bad dog!  The many-sided Malcourt!  Come on; I’ve got a motor across the—­”

“And I’ve an appointment with several superfluous people and a girl,” said Malcourt drily.  Then he glanced at the blond companion of the count who continued crumbling bread between her brilliantly ringed fingers as though she had never before seen Louis Malcourt.  The price of diamonds varies.  Sometimes it is merely fastidious observance of convention and a sensitive escort.  It all depends on the world one inhabits; it does indeed.

CHAPTER XIV

STRATEGY

An hour or two later that afternoon Wayward and Constance Palliser, Gussie Vetchen, and Livingston Cuyp gazed with variously mingled sentiments upon the torpid saurians belonging to one Alligator Joe in an enclosure rather remote from the hotel.

Vetchen bestowed largess upon the small, freckled boy attendant; and his distinguished disapproval upon the largest lady-crocodile which, with interlocked but grinning jaws, slumbered under a vertical sun in monochromatic majesty.

“One perpetual and gigantic simper,” he said, disgusted.

“Rather undignified for a thing as big as that to lay eggs like a hen,” observed Cuyp, not intending to be funny.

Wayward and Miss Palliser had wandered off together to inspect the pumps.  Vetchen, always inquisitive, had discovered a coy manatee in one tank, and was all for poking it with his walking-stick until he saw its preposterous countenance emerge from the water.

“Great heavens,” he faltered, “it looks like a Dutch ancestor of Cuyp’s!”

Cuyp, intensely annoyed, glanced at his watch.

“Where the mischief did Miss Suydam and Malcourt go?” he asked Wayward.  “I say, Miss Palliser, you don’t want to wait here any longer, do you?”

“They’re somewhere in the labyrinth,” said Wayward.  “Their chair went that way, didn’t it, boy?”

“Yeth, thir,” said the small and freckled attendant.

So the party descended the wooden incline to where their sleepy black chairmen lay on the grass, waiting; and presently the two double chairs wheeled away toward that amusing maze of jungle pathways cut through the impenetrable hammock, and popularly known as the labyrinth.