“I thought you deserted me,” I said, somewhat piqued.

“You deserted me,” she parried, nervously.  “However, I’ll forgive you if you’ll get me an ice.”

I hastened to do so.  But no sooner had I gone than Del Mar stalked through the hall and went up-stairs.  My domino girl was watching for him, and followed.

When I returned with the ice, I looked about, but she was gone.  It was scarcely a moment later, however, that I saw her hurry down-stairs, accompanied by the Mexican bolero.  I stepped forward to speak to her, but she almost ran past me without a word.

“A nut,” I remarked under my breath, pushing back my mask.

I started to eat the ice myself, when, a moment later, Elaine passed through the hall with a Spanish cavalier.

“Oh, Walter, here you are,” she laughed.  “I’ve been looking all over for you.  Thank you very much, sire,” she bowed with mock civility to the cavalier.  “It was only one dance, you know.  Please let me talk to Boum-Boum.”

The cavalier bowed reluctantly and left us.

“What are you doing here alone?” she asked, taking off her own mask.  “How warm it is.”

Before I could reply, I heard some one coming down-stairs back of me, but not in time to turn

“Elaine’s dressing-table,” a voice whispered in my ear.

I turned suddenly.  It was the gray friar.  Before I could even reach out to grasp his robe, he was gone.

“Another nut!” I exclaimed involuntarily.

“Why, what did he say?” asked Elaine.

“Something about your dressing-table.”

“My dressing-table?” she repeated.

We ran quickly up the steps.  Elaine’s room showed every evidence of having been the scene of a struggle, as she went over to the table.  There she picked up a rose and under it a piece of paper on which were some words printed with pencil roughly.

“Look,” she cried, as I read with her: 

   Do honest assistants search safes? 
    Let no one see this but Jameson.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“My safe!” she cried moving to a closet.  As she opened the door, imagine our surprise at seeing Del Mar lying on the floor, bound and gagged before the open safe.  “Get my scissors on the dresser,” cried Elaine.

I did so, hastily cutting the cords that bound Del Mar.

“What does it all mean?” asked Elaine as he rose and stretched himself.

Still clutching his throat, as if it hurt, Del Mar choked, “I found a man, a foreign agent, searching the safe.  But he overcame me and escaped.”

“Oh—­then that is what the—­”

Elaine checked herself.  She had been about to hand the note to Del Mar when an idea seemed to come to her.  Instead, she crumpled it up and thrust it into her bosom.

On the street the bolero and the domino girl were hurrying away as fast as they could.

Meanwhile, the gray friar had overcome Del Mar, had bound and gagged him, and trust him into the closet.  Then he wrote the note and laid it, with a rose from a vase, on Elaine’s dressing-table before he, too, followed.