hurry!” said Gerard de Montignac.

The Villa Iris stood in one of the meanest of the alleys to the left of the great landward gate—a dingy, long, green house with all its windows on the street carefully shuttered and something sinister in its aspect, as though it was the house of dark stories. When De Montignac and Ratenay stopped in front of it not a light was showing, but from somewhere far within there came the tinkle of a piano.

De Montignac pushed open the door and took a step down into a long, dark passage. They advanced for a few feet and then the door at the other end was thrown open, letting in a glare of lights and a great noise. Some one with the light behind him came towards them. Beyond that he was an officer in uniform they knew nothing of him until they heard his voice.

“So you have come to see for yourself, eh?” he cried gaily. “But you will do more than see to-night. Such a crowd in there!” and Praslin went past them.

“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.

“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard, for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind, pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door, and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.

At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the Native Department, of which he was in search.

“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.

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