The story ran that she had once been caught in a gambling raid, and her name kept out of the papers by the influence of a man in the Home Office who had been in love with her at the time.
And then he looked up, startled for once--for strange, untoward sounds were issuing from the lips of Bubbles Dunster.

The girl was leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, crouched upon the low chair, her slight, sinuous little figure bathed in red light.

She was groaning, rocking herself backwards and forwards convulsively.

To most of those present it was a strange, painful exhibition--painful, yet certainly thrilling! Suddenly she began to speak, and the words poured from her lips with a kind of breathless quickness.

But the strange, uncanny, startling thing about it was that the voice which uttered these staccato sentences was not Bubbles' well modulated, drawling voice.