If Septimus Dix crossed her mind while she was undressing, it was as a grotesque, bearing the same relation to her emotional impression of the night as a gargoyle does to a cathedral.

When she went to bed, she slept the sound sleep of youth.
Septimus, after dismissing the cab, wandered in his vague way over to the Cafe de Paris, instinct suggesting his belated breakfast, which, like his existence, Zora had forgotten.

The waiter came.
"_Monsieur desire ?_" "Absinthe," murmured Septimus absent-mindedly, "and--er--poached eggs--and anything--a raspberry ice." The waiter gazed at him in stupefaction; but nothing being too astounding in Monte Carlo, he wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead and executed the order.
The unholy meal being over, Septimus drifted into the square and spent most of the night on a bench gazing at the Hotel de Paris and wondering which were her windows.

When she mentioned casually, a day or two later, that her windows looked the other way over the sea, he felt that Destiny had fooled him once more; but for the time being he found a gentle happiness in his speculation.

Chilled to the bone, at last, he sought his hotel bedroom and smoked a pipe, meditative, with his hat on until the morning.