Between a garden and the pavement ran a stone coping, topped by a tall iron grill, and laden with screening vines.  The two men mounted this masonry and clung to the iron bars, as the crowd was driven back from the street by the outriders.  Before Benton’s eyes the whole mass of humanity swam in a blur of confusion and vertigo.  The passing files of blue and red soldiery seemed wavering figures mounted on reeling horses.  The King’s carriage swung into view and a crescendo of cheering went up from the crowd.

Benton saw blurred circles of color whirling dizzily about a steady center, and the center was the slender woman at Karyl’s side, who was the day after to-morrow to become his Queen.  He saw the fixed smile with which she tried to acknowledge the salutations as the crowd eddied about her carriage.  Her wide, stricken eyes were shimmery with imprisoned tears.  To drive through the streets of Puntal with that half-stunned misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached the outmost border of endurance.  Karyl bent solicitously forward and spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly.  It was all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to her coronation.  As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine.  Benton gripped the iron bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his.  For a moment her pupils dilated and one gloved hand convulsively tightened on the paneling of the carriage door.  The man dropped into the crowd and was swallowed up, and he knew by her familiar gesture of brushing something away from her temples, that she believed she had seen an image projected from a troubled brain.

“Come,” he said brokenly to his companion, “for God’s sake get me out of this crowd.”

* * * * *

The Strangers’ Club of Puntal sits high on a solid wall of rock and overlooks the sea.  Its beauty is too full of wizardry to seem real, and what nature had done in view and sub-tropical luxuriance the syndicate which operates the ball rooms, tea gardens, and roulette wheels has striven to abet.  To-night a moon two-thirds full immersed the grounds in a bath of blue and silver, and far off below the cliff wall the Mediterranean was phosphorescent.  In the room where the croupiers spun the wheels, the color scheme was profligate.

Benton idled at one of the tables, his eyes searching the crowd in the faint hope of discovering some thread which he might follow up to definite conclusion.  Beyond the wheel, just at the croupier’s elbow, stood a woman, audaciously yet charmingly gowned in red, with a scale-like shimmer of passementerie.  A red rose in her black hair threw into conspicuous effect its intense luster.

She might have been the genius of Rouge et Noir.  Her litheness had the panther’s sinuous strength.  The vivid contrast of olive cheeks, carmine lips and dark eyes, gave stress to her slender sensuousness.