The panic became general. There were three shots in quick succession, and then a fusillade. Rags saw Este firing coolly at the eight amber lights above, and a thick fume of gray smoke began to fill the air. As a strange undertone to the shouting and screaming came the incessant clamor of the distant jazz band.
Then in a moment it was all over. A shrill whistle rang out over the roof, and through the smoke Rags saw John Chestnut advancing toward the plain-clothes man, his hands held out in a gesture of surrender. There was a last nervous cry, a chill clatter as someone inadvertently stepped into a pile of dishes, and then a heavy silence fell on the roof—even the band seemed to have died away.
“It’s all over!” John Chestnut’s voice rang out wildly on the night air. “The party’s over. Everybody who wants to can go home!”
Still there was silence—Rags knew it was the silence of awe—the strain of guilt had driven John Chestnut insane.
“It was a great performance,” he was shouting. “I want to thank you one and all. If you can find any tables still standing, champagne will be served as long as you care to stay.”
It seemed to Rags that the roof and the high stars suddenly began to swim round and round. She saw John take the detective’s hand and shake it heartily, and she watched the detective grin and pocket his gun. The music had recommenced, and the girl who had fainted was suddenly dancing with Lord Charles Este in the corner. John was running here and there patting people on the back, and laughing and shaking hands. Then he was coming toward her, fresh and innocent as a child.
“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he cried.
Rags felt a faintness stealing over her. She groped backward with her hand toward a chair.
“What was it?” she cried dazedly. “Am I dreaming?”
“Of course not! You’re wide awake. I made it up, Rags, don’t you see? I made up the whole thing for you. I had it invented! The only thing real about it was my name!”
She collapsed suddenly against his coat, clung to his lapels, and would have wilted to the floor if he had not caught her quickly in his arms.
“Some champagne—quick!” he called, and then he shouted at the Prince of Wales, who stood near by. “Order my car quick, you! Miss Martin-Jones has fainted from excitement.”
The skyscraper rose bulkily through thirty tiers of windows before it attenuated itself to a graceful sugar-loaf of shining white. Then it darted up again another hundred feet, thinned to a mere oblong tower in its last fragile aspiration toward the sky. At the highest of its high windows Rags Martin-Jones stood full in the stiff breeze, gazing down at the city.
“Mr. Chestnut wants to know if you’ll come right in to his private office.”
Obediently her slim feet moved along the carpet into a high, cool chamber overlooking the harbor and the wide sea.
John Chestnut sat at his desk, waiting, and Rags walked to him and put her arms around his shoulder.
“Are you sure you’re real?” she asked anxiously. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“You only wrote me a week before you came,” he protested modestly, “or I could have arranged a revolution.”
“Was the whole thing just mine?” she demanded. “Was it a perfectly useless, gorgeous thing, just for me?”
“Useless?” He considered. “Well, it started out to be. At the last minute I invited a big restaurant man to be there, and while you were at the other table I sold him the whole idea of the nightclub.”
He looked at his watch.
“I’ve got one more thing to do—and then we’ve got just time to be married before lunch.” He picked up his telephone. “Jackson? … Send a triplicated cable to Paris, Berlin, and Budapest and have those two bogus dukes who tossed up for Schwartzberg-Rhineminster chased over the Polish border. If the Dutchy won’t act, lower the rate of exchange to point triple zero naught two. Also, that idiot Blutchdak is in the Balkans again, trying to start a new war. Put him on the first boat for New York or else throw him in a Greek jail.”
He rang off, turned to the startled cosmopolite with a laugh.
“The next stop is the City Hall. Then, if you like, we’ll run over to Paris.”
“John,” she asked him intently, “who was the Prince of Wales?”
He waited till they were in the elevator, dropping twenty floors at a swoop. Then he leaned forward and tapped the lift-boy on the shoulder.
“Not so fast, Cedric. This lady isn’t used to falls from high places.”
The elevator-boy turned around, smiled. His face was pale, oval, framed in yellow hair. Rags blushed like fire.
“Cedric’s from Wessex,” explained John. “The resemblance is, to say the least, amazing. Princes are not particularly discreet, and I suspect Cedric of being a Guelph in some left-handed way.”
Rags took the monocle from around her neck and threw the ribbon over Cedric’s head.
“Thank you,” she said simply, “for the second greatest thrill of my life.”
John Chestnut began rubbing his hands together in a commercial gesture.
“Patronize this place, lady,” he besought her. “Best bazaar in the city!”
“What have you got for sale?”
“Well, m’selle, today we have some perfectly bee‑oo‑tiful love.”
“Wrap it up, Mr. Merchant,” cried Rags Martin-Jones. “It looks like a bargain to me.”
It was a particularly sordid and degraded murder trial, and Jacob Booth, writhing quietly on a spectators’ bench, felt that he had childishly gobbled something without being hungry, simply because it was there. The newspapers had humanized the case, made a cheap, neat problem play out of an affair of the jungle, so passes that actually
