"It's worse than you think," Peter complained. "I can stand her not caring for me. Why should she?"

"Why, indeed?"

"It's because she's gone and promised to marry Bayard Shaynon."

P. Sybarite looked dazed.

"She? Bayard Shaynon? Who's the girl?"

"Marian Blessington. Why do you ask? Do you know her?"

There was a pause. P. Sybarite blinked furiously.

"I've heard that name," he said quietly, at length. "Isn't she old Brian's ward--the girl who disappeared recently?"

"She didn't disappear, really. She's been staying with friends--told me so herself. That's all the foundation the _Journal_ had for its story."

"Friends?"

"So she said."

"Did she name them?"

"No--"

"Or say where?"

"No; but some place out of town, of course."

"Of course," P. Sybarite repeated mechanically. He eyed fixedly the ash on the end of his cigar. "And she told you she meant to marry Bayard Shaynon, did she!"

"She said she'd promised.... And that," the boy broke out, "was what drove me crazy. He's--he's--well, you know what he is."

"His father's son," said P. Sybarite gloomily.

"He was there to-night--the old man, too; and after what Marian had told me, I just couldn't trust myself to meet or speak to either of them. So I bolted back here, took a stiff drink, changed from costume to these clothes, and went out to make a besotted a.s.s of myself.

Naturally I landed in Dutch House. And there--the first thing I noticed when I went in was old Shaynon, sitting at the same table you took, later--waiting. Imagine my surprise--I'd left him at the Bizarre not thirty minutes before!"

"I'm imagining it, Peter. Get ahead."

"I hailed him, but he wouldn't recognise me--simply glared. Presently Red November came in and they went upstairs together. So I stuck around, hoping to get hold of Red and make him drunk enough to talk.

Curiously enough when Shaynon left, Red came directly to my table and sat down. But by that time I'd had some champagne on top of whiskey and was beginning to know that if I pumped in anything more, it'd be November's party instead of mine. And when he tried to insist on my drinking more, I got scared--feeling what I'd had as much as I did."

"You're not the fool you try to seem," P. Sybarite conceded. "I heard November promise Shaynon, at the door, that you wouldn't remember much when you came to. The old scoundrel didn't want to be seen--hadn't expected to be recognised and, when he found you'd followed, planned to fix things so that you'd never tell on him."

"But _why_?"

"That's what I'm trying to figure out. There's some sort of shenanigan brewing, or my first name's Peter, the same as yours--which I wish it was so.... Be quiet a bit and let me think."

For a little while P. Sybarite sat pondering with vacant eyes; and the wounded boy stared upward with a frown, as though endeavouring to puzzle the answer to this riddle out of the blankness of the ceiling.

"What time does this Hadley-Owen party break up?"

"Not till daylight. It's the last big fixture of the social season, and ordinarily they keep it up till sunrise."

"It'll be still going, then?"

"Strong. They'll be in full swing, now, of after-supper dancing."

"That settles it: I'm going."

The boy lifted on his elbow in amaze, then subsided with a grunt of pain.

"_You're_ going?"

"You say you've got a costume of some sort here? I'll borrow it. We're much of a size."

"Heaven knows you're welcome, but--"

"But what?"

"You have no invitation."

Rising, P. Sybarite smiled loftily. "Don't worry about that. If I can't bribe my way past a cordon of mercenary foreign waiters--and talk down any other opposition--I'm neither as flush as I think nor as Irish."

"But what under the sun do you want there?"

"To see what's doing--find out for myself what devilment Brian Shaynon's hatching. Maybe I'll do no good--and maybe I'll be able to put a spoke in his wheel. To do that--once--_right_--I'd be willing to die as poor as I've lived till this blessed night!"

He paused an instant on the threshold of his cousin's bedroom; turned back a sombre visage.

"I've little love for Brian Shaynon, myself, or none. You know what he did to me--and mine."

XVI

BEELZEBUB

Late enough in all conscience was the last guest to arrive for the Hadley-Owen masquerade.

Already town-cars, carriages, and private 'busses were being called for and departing with their share of the more seasoned and sober-sided revellers, to whom bed and appet.i.te for breakfast had come to mean more than a chance to romp through a cotillion by the light of the rising sun--to say discreetly little or nothing of those other conveyances which had borne away _their_ due proportion of far less sage and by no means sober-sided ones, who yet retained sufficient sense of the fitness of things to realise that bed followed by matutinal bromides would be better for them than further dalliance with the effervescent and evanescent spirits of festivity.

More and more frequently the elevators, empty but for their attendants, were flying up to the famous ball-room floor of the Bizarre, to descend heavy-laden with languid laughing parties of gaily-costumed ladies and gentlemen no less brilliantly attired--prince and pauper, empress and shepherdess, monk, milkmaid, and mountebank: all weary yet reluctant in their going.

And at this hour a smallish gentleman, in an old-style Inverness opera-coat that cloaked him to his ankles, with an opera hat set jauntily a wee bit askew on his head, a mask of crimson silk covering his face from brows to lips, slipped silently like some sly, sinister shadow through the Fifth Avenue portals of the Bizarre, and shaped a course by his wits across the lobby to the elevators, so discreetly and un.o.btrusively that none of the flunkeys in attendance noticed his arrival.