His work was done!  Yes.  But was that to be all?  Had the light in his eyes and the vibrant tremor in his voice as he talked with her—­had these been part of his “work,” too?  Was it all to end, like this,—­and before it had begun?

To her own surprise and to her brother’s greater astonishment, the usually self-contained Claire Standish burst into a tempest of weeping.

“Poor, poor little girl!” soothed Milo.  “It’s all been too much for you!  No one could have stood up under such a strain.  I’ll tell you what we’re going to do:  We’re going to Miami, for a week or two, and have a jolly time and make you try to forget all this mystery and excitement.  We’ll go to-morrow morning, if you say so.”

The Miami season was at its climax.  The half-moon driveway outside the front entrance to the Royal Palm Hotel was crowded thick with waiting motor cars, whose occupants were at the hotel’s semi-weekly dance.  On the brightlit front veranda men in white and in dinner-clothes and women in every hue of evening dress were passing to and fro.  Elderly folk, sitting in deep porch chairs, watched through the long windows the gayly-moving dancers in the ballroom.  Out through wide-open doors and windows pulsed the rhythmic music.

Above hung the great white stars in the blue-black Southern skies.  The bay stretched glimmering and phosphorescent away from the palm-girt hotel gardens.  The trade-winds set the myriad dry palm-fronds to rustling like the downpour of summer rain.

Up the steps from the gardens drifted promenaders and dancers, in groups or in twos and threes.  Then, up the stairway moved a slender, white-clad figure, alone.

Claire Standish had sought to do as her brother had wished, and to forget, in the carefree life of the White City, the happenings she had been through.  Dutifully she had come to Miami with him.  Dutifully, for the past three days, she had joined him in such gayeties as he had suggested.  Dutifully, to-night, she had come with him to this dance.  And all the time her heart had been as heavy as lead.

Now, getting rid of her partner on some pretext, she had gone out into the softly illumined gardens to be alone with the yearning and heartache she could not shake off.  Then, fearing lest Milo, or some other of the men she knew, might come in search of her and wonder at her desire to mope alone under the stars, she had turned back to the hotel.

As she mounted the last stair to the veranda, a man in dinner clothes stepped forward from one of the porch’s great white pillars, and advanced to meet her.

“There’s a corner table at the Cafe de la Paix, in Paris,” he greeted her, striving to control his voice and to speak lightly, “that every one on earth must pass by, sooner or later.  The front veranda of the Royal Palm is like that.  Soon or late, everybody crosses it.  When I got back this afternoon, I heard you had left home and that you were somewhere in Miami.  I couldn’t find you.  So I came here—­and waited.”