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“There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the uproar. “’Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!”

“Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.”

“No!” Amory whispered.

“Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about one o’clock!”

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the room.

“There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.

“Oh, he’s all right. Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Dachari.”

“Make it four.”

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the café, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phœbe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the café, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.