The Lighted Match

Between a garden and the pavement ran a stone coping, topped by a tall

iron grill, and laden with screening vines. The two men mounted this

masonry and clung to the iron bars, as the crowd was driven back from

the street by the outriders. Before Benton's eyes the whole mass of

humanity swam in a blur of confusion and vertigo. The passing files of

blue and red soldiery seemed wavering figures mounted on reeling horses.

The King's carriage swung into view and a crescendo of cheering went up

from the crowd.

Benton saw blurred circles of color whirling dizzily about a steady

center, and the center was the slender woman at Karyl's side, who was

the day after to-morrow to become his Queen. He saw the fixed smile with

which she tried to acknowledge the salutations as the crowd eddied about

her carriage. Her wide, stricken eyes were shimmery with imprisoned

tears. To drive through the streets of Puntal with that half-stunned

misery written clear in lips and eyes, she must, he knew, have reached

the outmost border of endurance. Karyl bent solicitously forward and

spoke, and she nodded as if answering in a dream, smiling wanly. It was

all as some young Queen might have gone to the guillotine rather than to

her coronation. As she looked bewilderedly from side to side her glance

fell upon the clustering flowers of the vine. Benton gripped the iron

bars and groaned, and then her eyes met his. For a moment her pupils

dilated and one gloved hand convulsively tightened on the paneling of

the carriage door. The man dropped into the crowd and was swallowed up,

and he knew by her familiar gesture of brushing something away from her

temples, that she believed she had seen an image projected from a

troubled brain.

"Come," he said brokenly to his companion, "for God's sake get me out of

this crowd."

* * * * *

The Strangers' Club of Puntal sits high on a solid wall of rock and

overlooks the sea. Its beauty is too full of wizardry to seem real, and

what nature had done in view and sub-tropical luxuriance the syndicate

which operates the ball rooms, tea gardens, and roulette wheels has

striven to abet. To-night a moon two-thirds full immersed the grounds in

a bath of blue and silver, and far off below the cliff wall the

Mediterranean was phosphorescent. In the room where the croupiers spun

the wheels, the color scheme was profligate.

Benton idled at one of the tables, his eyes searching the crowd in the

faint hope of discovering some thread which he might follow up to

definite conclusion. Beyond the wheel, just at the croupier's elbow,

stood a woman, audaciously yet charmingly gowned in red, with a

scale-like shimmer of passementerie. A red rose in her black hair threw

into conspicuous effect its intense luster.