in one corner of the room in the full glare of the light, waiting for
the monarch to come. Above were arranged with artistic _raffinement_
weird oriental draperies, resembling a crimson canopy in the total
effect. Chattering visitors were standing in groups, or had seated
themselves on the divans and curiously-fashioned chairs that were
scattered in seeming disorder throughout the salon. There were critics
and writers and men of the world. Everybody who was anybody and a little
bigger than somebody else was holding court in his own small circle of
enthusiastic admirers. The Bohemian element was subdued, but not
entirely lacking. The magic of Reginald Clarke's name made stately dames
blind to the presence of some individuals whom they would have passed on
the street without recognition.

Ernest surveyed this gorgeous assembly with the absent look of a
sleep-walker. Not that his sensuous soul was unsusceptible to the
atmosphere of culture and corruption that permeated the whole, nor to
the dazzling colour effects that tantalised while they delighted the
eye. But to-night they shrivelled into insignificance before the
splendour of his inner vision. A radiant dreamland palace, his play, had
risen from the night of inchoate thought. It was wonderful, it was real,
and needed for its completion only the detail of actual construction.
And now the characters were hovering in the recesses of his brain, were
yearning to leave that many-winded labyrinth to become real beings of
paper and ink. He would probably have tarried overlong in this fanciful
mansion, had not the reappearance of an unexpected guest broken his
reverie.

"Jack!" he exclaimed in surprise, "I thought you a hundred miles away
from here."