A covered passageway had been added this year from the Villa Shalimar to the Villa Mimosa. Shalimar had been built three years previously and sold, as soon as it was finished, to the Rajah of Jehangar.

It was an enormous, pretentious building, dazzling white, which commanded from its position high up on the hill above Monte Carlo a magnificent view of the town below and the sea beyond.

Large though it was, the Rajah had found himself the previous year cramped for space when he had accommodated not only his official staff with its crowd of Aides-de-Camp, Secretaries, Major Domos and their personal attendants, but also the lady of his choice, who invariably accompanied him on his annual visits to Monte Carlo. And so at great expense the Rajah purchased the Villa Mimosa and with some architectural ingenuity, for the Villas were on different levels, had it joined to the Villa Shalimar.

The Villa Mimosa this year housed Miss Stella Style.

She was large, blonde, and extremely decorative. The Rajah had seen her in the chorus of one of the big London theatres and had lost his heart from the moment she swept on to the stage with her fair hair hanging loose over her naked shoulders.

The Rajah had pursued his usual and invariably successful method of wooing.

He sent Stella a basket of orchids which required two attendants to carry it into the already overcrowded dressing room she shared with a dozen other girls, and when she had recovered sufficiently from her astonishment to examine the basket more closely, she found a diamond bracelet concealed among the blooms and a note from the Rajah asking her out to supper.

As Chrissie pointed out, the Rajah’s invitation could not have come at a better time. Stella agreed with her, of course, for she invariably agreed with Chrissie, but she did think it was unnecessary to have too much emphasis laid on the fact that her admirers were getting fewer and that she was finding it increasingly difficult to keep them interested.

This, as Chrissie also told her not for the first time, was due entirely to her own laziness.

Stella at twenty-seven was as pretty as she had been at seventeen. Her looks had never been anything but of the pink and white china doll variety, which in London was too commonplace to cause much comment, but which abroad proved almost sensational. Her figure was perfect although slightly on the large side, which fortunately appeared at the moment to be on the verge of becoming fashionable. And her hair, although it owed much of the brilliance of its colour to a skilful coiffeur in Wardour Street, was nevertheless long and luxuriant enough to ensure its being one of the assets which kept her on the pay roll of the more popular West End theatres.