“You didn’t ask me,” said Brimmer.  “She came to consult me about South American affairs.  It seems that filibuster General Leonidas, alias Perkins, whose little game we stopped by that Peruvian contract, actually landed in Quinquinambo and established a government.  It seems she knows him, has a great admiration for him as a Liberator, as she calls him.  I think they correspond!”

“She’s a wonderful woman, by jingo, Brimmer!  I’d like to hear whom she don’t know,” said Markham, beaming with a patronizing vanity.  “There’s you, and there’s that filibuster, and old Governor Pico, that she’s just snatched bald-headed—­I mean, you know, that he recognizes her worth, don’t you see?  Not like this cattle you see here.”

“Are you coming with me?” said Brimmer, gravely buttoning up his coat, as if encasing himself in a panoply of impervious respectability.

“I’ll join you at the hotel,” said Markham hurriedly.  “There’s a man over there in the parquet that I want to say a word to; don’t wait for me.”

With a slight inclination of the head Mr. Brimmer passed out into the lobby, erect, self-possessed, and impeccable.  One or two of his commercial colleagues of maturer age, who were loitering leisurely by the wall, unwilling to compromise themselves by actually sitting down, took heart of grace at this correct apparition.  Brimmer nodded to them coolly, as if on ’Change, and made his way out of the theatre.  He had scarcely taken a few steps before a furious onset of wind and rain drove him into a doorway for shelter.  At the same moment a slouching figure, with a turned-up coat-collar, slipped past him and disappeared in a passage at his right.  Partly hidden by his lowered umbrella, Mr. Brimmer himself escaped notice, but he instantly recognized his late companion, Markham.  As he resumed his way up the street he glanced into the passage.  Halfway down, a light flashed upon the legend “Stage Entrance.”  Quincy Brimmer, with a faint smile, passed on to his hotel.

It was striking half-past eleven when Mr. Brimmer again issued from his room in the Oriental and passed down a long corridor.  Pausing a moment before a side hall that opened from it, he cast a rapid look up and down the corridor, and then knocked hastily at a door.  It was opened sharply by a lady’s maid, who fell back respectfully before Mr. Brimmer’s all-correct presence.

Half reclining on a sofa in the parlor of an elaborate suite of apartments was the woman whom Mr. Brimmer had a few hours before beheld on the stage of the theatre.  Lifting her eyes languidly from a book that lay ostentatiously on her lap, she beckoned her visitor to approach.  She was a woman still young, whose statuesque beauty had but slightly suffered from cosmetics, late hours, and the habitual indulgence of certain hysterical emotions that were not only inconsistent with the classical suggestions of her figure, but had left traces not unlike the grosser excitement of alcoholic stimulation.  She looked like a tinted statue whose slight mutations through stress of time and weather had been unwisely repaired by freshness of color.