Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/216

204 "How do you like your new position?" he had asked in the dimness at the head of the stairway. She could not see his face, but it was because he kept her head rather closely pressed into the hollow of his shoulder. Otherwise she might have detected the guilty flicker in his eyes.

"I love it. She is such a dear. But, really, Eric, I don't think I'm worth half what she pays me."

He chuckled softly. "Oh, yes, you are. You are certainly worth half what my boss pays me."

"But I do not earn it," she insisted.

"Neither do I," said he.

To return to the Marchioness and the newspaper:

"We will go off on a little spree before long, my dear. A good dinner at Spangler's, a little music, and a chat with the sensation of the hour. Get Mrs. Hendricks on the telephone, please. I will ask her to join us there some night soon with her husband. He is the man who wrote that delightful novel with the name I never can remember. You will like him, I know. He is so dreadfully deaf that all one has to do to include him in the conversation is to return his smiles occasionally."

And so, on a certain night in mid-April, it came to pass that Spangler's Café, gay and full of the din that sustains the genus New Yorker in his contention that there is no other place in the world fit to live in, had among its patrons a number of the persons connected with this story of the City of Masks.

First of all, there was the new leader of the orchestra, a dapper, romantic-looking young man in a flaming red coat. Ah, but you should have seen him! The admirable Mirabeau, true Frenchman that he was, had per-