“This is my sanctum,” he announced.  “I allow no one in here without special permission.  I find it useful to have a place to which one can come and rest quite quietly sometimes.  Williams here has no other duty except to guard the entrance.  Williams, you will allow this gentleman and these two ladies to pass in at a quarter to twelve.”

The man looked at them searchingly.

“Certainly, sir,” he said.  “No one else?”

“No one, under any pretext.”

Sir Timothy hurried back to the hall, and the others followed him in more leisurely fashion.  They were all three full of curiosity.

“I never dreamed,” Margaret declared, as she looked around her, “that I should ever find myself inside this house.  It has always seemed to me like one great bluebeard’s chamber.  If ever my father spoke of it at all, it was as of a place which he intended to convert into a sort of miniature Hell.”

Sir Timothy leaned back to speak to them as they passed.

“You will find a friend over there, Ledsam,” he said.

Wilmore turned around and faced them.  The two men exchanged somewhat surprised greetings.

“No idea that I was coming until this afternoon,” Wilmore explained.  “I got my card at five o’clock, with a note from Sir Timothy’s secretary.  I am racking my brains to imagine what it can mean.”

“We’re all a little addled,” Francis confessed.  “Come and join our tour of exploration.  You know Lady Cynthia.  Let me present you to Mrs. Hilditch.”

The introduction was effected and they all, strolled on together.  Margaret and Lady Cynthia led the way into the winter-garden, a palace of glass, tall palms, banks of exotics, flowering shrubs of every description, and a fountain, with wonderfully carved water nymphs, brought with its basin from Italy.  Hidden in the foliage, a small orchestra was playing very softly.  The atmosphere of the place was languorous and delicious.

“Leave us here,” Margaret insisted, with a little exclamation of content.  “Neither Cynthia nor I want to go any further.  Come back and fetch us in time for our appointment.”

The two men wandered off.  The place was indeed a marvel of architecture, a country house, of which only the shell remained, modernised and made wonderful by the genius of a great architect.  The first room which they entered when they left the winter-garden, was as large as a small restaurant, panelled in cream colour, with a marvellous ceiling.  There were tables of various sizes laid for supper, rows of champagne bottles in ice buckets, and servants eagerly waiting for orders.  Already a sprinkling of the guests had found their way here.  The two men crossed the floor to the cocktail bar in the far corner, behind which a familiar face grinned at them.  It was Jimmy, the bartender from Soto’s, who stood there with a wonderful array of bottles on a walnut table.