"Mr. Lanyard!"--Liane's introduction had been effected in English--"I _am_ so glad to know you. It seems to me Liane knows all the interesting people--and nobody else."
"One trusts very truly you will not find need tonight to revise that recommendation," Lanyard returned, bowing low over the little hand. He added with an enquiring inflexion, because he wasn't sure of having caught the name aright: "Mrs. McFee . . ."
"Mrs. Folliott McFee," Liane supplied with an accent on the Folliott that supplemented something to this sense: 'Surely you must know that magic name!'
"Folly for short," laughed Mrs. McFee--"Folly to my friends." Then she gave a small make-believe shriek because the sable robe was being lifted from her shoulders by the gentleman of the carven countenance. "Peter Pagan! how you startled me . . . You know Peter Pagan, of course, Mr. Lanyard: everybody does."
"Business of initiating you to the inner circle of certified somebodies, Mr. Lanyard," quoth Mr. Pagan solemnly, shaking hands, and leaving Lanyard with a feeling that no man had a right to look like that if he couldn't extemporize more tellingly.
But Liane had dropped a hand upon his sleeve and was drawing him aside to be made known to the Sultan of Loot.
"Mr. Morphew: Mr. Lanyard . . . You must become good friends, you two who are both such good friends of mine."
This impressive figure of the immobile and livid face and the hooded eyes, this Mr. Hugh Morphew, met Lanyard with a manner subtly allusive beneath a show of non-committal courtesy. His smile was grave, reticent and fugitive, a solitary cat's-paw flawing the surface of plumbless deeps; his few words were carefully chosen and cast in polished periods by an orotund voice: he was honoured to make the acquaintance of Mr. Lanyard and hoped that he, as a friend of Mademoiselle Delorme, would be so very good as to become one of their number for the remainder of the evening . . . But in the cast of his eye, the clasp of his hand, in an undertone his accents had as he pronounced these perfunctory phrases, there was meaning intended to be seized by Lanyard only, and which the latter interpreted much to this effect: 'We have been waiting a long time for this meeting, you and I. But patience: all in good time we will come to understand each other perfectly.' . . .