eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the
hotel register, for he felt within himself the true equipment for
that delicate mission. He fairly panted to be at it.

Fate was amiable. The hotel clerk, coerced with a couple of
gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn
that the blue-eyed one's name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that
she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss
Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled
otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and
dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part--with a
correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

* * * * *

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or
does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it
does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in
Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpenglühen is
obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk,
then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair
in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and
gamesters and débutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid
ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated
presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated
traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then
decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy's path as
he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl