“Thank you so much for your tea,” she said in a lowered tone to her unfortunate host.  “I’ve had a delicious time....  I’m sorry if I disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval.  Oh, don’t bother to come in with me—­I know my way to the lift and the band is going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and make a showing.”

Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme sympathy and intimate understanding.  He was a nice and right-minded young man and she was an utter minx.  She was the daughter of unreason and the granddaughter of folly.  She needed, emphatically needed, to be shown.  But this Englishman, with his harsh and violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the man for the need.  It took a lighter touch—­the hand of iron in the velvet glove, as it were.  It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.

Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for that delicate mission.  He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable.  The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn that the blue-eyed one’s name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss Eversham.  The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled otherwise.  They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and dissatisfaction.  Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part—­with a correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

* * * * *

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or does not constitute an introduction.  Sometimes it does; sometimes it does not.  When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpengluehen is obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk, then usually it does.  When the hotel is a large and expensive affair in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and gamesters and debutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy’s path as he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner.  The shawl belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him, but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

“You dropped this?” he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the shawl, which she mechanically accepted.  “Why I—­I didn’t remember having it with me,” she hesitated.