"Monday evenings, only."

"This is a good cocktail," observed Cressey, savoring it expertly.

"Better than they serve to me. And, say, Banneker, did Mertoun make you that outfit?"

"Yes."

"Then I quit him," declared the gilded youth.

"Why? Isn't it all right?"

"All right! Dammit, it's a better job than ever I got out of him,"

returned his companion indignantly. "Some change from the catalogue suit you sported when you landed here! You know how to wear 'em; I've got to say that for you.... I've got to get back. When'll you dine with me? I want to hear all about it."

"Any Monday," answered Banneker.

Cressey returned to his waiting potage, and was immediately bombarded with queries, mainly from the girl on his left.

"Who's the wonderful-looking foreigner?"

"He isn't a foreigner. At least not very much."

"He looks like a North Italian princeling I used to know," said one of the women. "One of that warm-complexioned out-of-door type, that preserves the Roman mould. Isn't he an Italian?"

"He's an American. I ran across him out in the desert country."

"Hence that burned-in brown. What was he doing out there?"

Cressey hesitated. Innocent of any taint of snobbery himself, he yet did not know whether Banneker would care to have his humble position tacked onto the tails of that work of art, his new coat. "He was in the railroad business," he returned cautiously. "His name is Banneker."

"I've been seeing him for months," remarked another of the company.

"He's always alone and always at that table. Nobody knows him. He's a mystery."

"He's a beauty," said Cressey's left-hand neighbor.

Miss Esther Forbes had been quite openly staring, with her large, gray, and childlike eyes, at Banneker, eating his oysters in peaceful unconsciousness of being made a subject for discussion. Miss Forbes was a Greuze portrait come to life and adjusted to the extremes of fashion.

Behind an expression of the sweetest candor and wistfulness, as behind a safe bulwark, she preserved an effrontery which balked at no defiance of conventions in public, though essentially she was quite sufficiently discreet for self-preservation. Also she had a keen little brain, a reckless but good-humored heart and a memory retentive of important trifles.

"In the West, Bertie?" she inquired of Cressey. "You were in that big wreck there, weren't you?"

"Devil of a wreck," said Cressey uneasily. You never could tell what Esther might know or might not say.

"Ask him over here," directed that young lady blandly, "for coffee and liqueurs."

"Oh, I say!" protested one of the men. "Nobody knows anything about him--"

"He's a friend of mine," put in Cressey, in a tone which ended that particular objection. "But I don't think he'd come."

Instantly there was a chorus of demand for him.

"All right, I'll try," yielded Cressey, rising.

"Put him next to me," directed Miss Forbes.

The emissary visited Banneker's table, was observed to be in brief colloquy with him, and returned, alone.

"Wouldn't he come?" interrogated the chorus.

"He's awfully sorry, but he says he isn't fit for decent human associations."

"More and more interesting!"--"Why?"--"What awful thing has he been doing?"

"Eating onions," answered Cressey. "Raw."

"I don't believe it," cried the indignant Miss Forbes. "One doesn't eat raw onions at Sherry's. It's a subterfuge."

"Very likely."

"If I went over there myself, who'll bet a dozen silk stockings that I can't--"

"Come off it, Ess," protested her brother-in-law across the table.

"That's too high a jump, even for you."

She let herself be dissuaded, but her dovelike eyes were vagrant during the rest of the dinner.

Pleasantly musing over the last glass of a good but moderate-priced Rosemont-Geneste, Banneker became aware of Cressey's dinner party filing past him: then of Jules, the waiter, discreetly murmuring something, from across the table. A faint and provocative scent came to his nostrils, and as he followed Jules's eyes he saw a feminine figure standing at his elbow. He rose promptly and looked down into a face which might have been modeled for a type of appealing innocence.

"You're Mr. Banneker, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I'm Esther Forbes, and I think I've heard a great deal about you."

"It doesn't seem probable," he replied gravely.

"From a cousin of mine," pursued the girl. "She was Io Welland. Haven't I?"

A shock went through Banneker at the mention of the name. But he steadied himself to say: "I don't think so."

Herein he was speaking by the letter. Knowing Io Welland as he had, he deemed it very improbable that she had even so much as mentioned him to any of her friends. In that measure, at least, he believed, she would have respected the memory of the romance which she had so ruthlessly blasted. This girl, with the daring and wistful eyes, was simply fishing, so he guessed.

His guess was correct. Mendacity was not outside of Miss Forbes's easy code when enlisted in a good cause, such as appeasing her own impish curiosity. Never had Io so much as mentioned that quaint and lively romance with which vague gossip had credited her, after her return from the West; Esther Forbes had gathered it in, gossamer thread by gossamer thread, and was now hoping to identify Banneker in its uncertain pattern. Her little plan of startling him into some betrayal had proven abortive. Not by so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her marriage, must be something out of the ordinary. Instinct of womankind told Miss Forbes that this and no other was the type of man to work such a miracle.

"But you did know Io?" she persisted, feeling, as she afterward confessed, that she was putting her head into the mouth of a lion concerning whose habits her knowledge was regrettably insufficient.

The lion did not bite her head off. He did not even roar. He merely said, "Yes."

"In a railroad wreck or something of that sort?"