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 If they exchanged places her interest perversely changed, too, and her performances helplessly directed themselves at the man who had moved to a distance; he at once became the more attractive to her. "Attractive" was her own word, and may be recorded as the most generously elastic in all her vocabulary; for, although a gentleman at a little distance was more "attractive" to her than one close at hand, it might be said that she was indifferent to no man whom she could possibly contrive to include under that definition. She even sheltered the Bastoni under it, partly because of their monocles, it is true; and her treatment of all "attractive" men seemed to indicate that she felt not only a spontaneous enthusiasm for the least of them but a duty to all of them—the duty, apparently, of offering them a focus for their attention, or, it might be, for their devotion.

Thus, though Arturo Liana, being at her side, was now in her eyes principally a picturesque adjunct of the scene she was playing to the gentleman at a distance, she was far from indifferent to him. On the contrary, she was not only interested in offering him a focus for devotion, but she was honestly interested in something fine and a little mysterious that she perceived in him. "You are mysterious," she told him,

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 remembering how deeply she had often pleased young gentlemen at home by such a charge; and she was laughingly frank enough to mention this now. "I've told boys that before, just to flatter them; but it's really true about you. You're mysterious as thunder."

"I am mysterious?" he repeated; and, although when he spoke English it was usually with an almost undetectable imperfection, he delighted her by adding, "As sunder? How is sunder mysterious?"

She laughed outright and corrected him. "Thunder, not 'sunder.' Can't you say 'thunder'?"

"Is it necessary?"

"Dear me!" she cried. "Isn't anything I ask you to do necessary?"

"Indeed I fear it is," he said seriously, almost ruefully. "Thunder. Is that right? I am as mysterious as sunder—as thunder, I wish to say. How?"

At that she seemed to become serious too. "Well, in the first place you look as if you were keeping some great thought to yourself."

"Am I so bad? You mean an appearance of egotism?"

"No. Not anything like that. What I mean, it's as if you had a high ideal you'd never be willing to

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 talk about. I mean you look as if you were engaged in a great Cause, or something. Are you?"

"Am I?" He smiled, and then replied with a gallantry in which there was obviously enough genuineness to excuse it: "I am engage' in sitting on a bench with Miss Claire Ambler. With that privilege, how could I be engage' in anything else?"

"There you go!" she protested. "Whenever I try to find out what your mystery is, you say something like that. You always do it, too, when I mention Baron Bastoni or his brother; but maybe that's only because you feel a social difference between you and them."

"Social?" The young man's shoulders, rising slightly, disclaimed the imputation. "There is an English word, 'snob.' Modern Italy believes it is bourgeois to be a snob. We will be brother to any man who is brother to us in what he thinks. I do not care anything social, one way or the other, about the Bastoni. I am not a snob."

"Mr. Rennie told me the other day what you do care about," she said. "You care about Fascismo."

"Yes," he said gravely. "Well?"

"Is that why you hate the Bastoni? Because they

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 are against it? The baron told me that almost all the people about here are against it."

"At least," he said a little sadly, "they are agains' me. I am not very popular in Raona, Miss Ambler. In the firs' place, I am forestiere—from the north—the people look upon me as a foreigner as much as they do you; only they would think of you kindly in that way, and of me unkindly. In the secon' place, they think I am here to meddle with them; it would not be too much to say they think I am something quite like an intriguer and a spy. The Bastoni have been successful to assist that impression."

"Do you think so?" she asked doubtfully. "They seem so quiet and nice-mannered I can't imagine it. Why should they do such a thing?"

"We are upon opposite sides. You see, I am one of the men who believe Italy is being save' by a leader and his great ideal; and any of us is ready to make a sacrifice to help bring all the people to serve the ideal. The people in the country and villages here are backward and very independent; they don' like it, and the Bastoni wish to get some power out of that. But probably you can hardly tell what I am talking about, Miss Ambler?"

"Oh, yes, I can," she said promptly. "You mean

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 the Bastoni are trying to keep the Fascisti from getting better organized here, and they think you're doing the organizing; Mr. Rennie told me. But I don't see why anything like that should make a personal feeling, as it does seem to do, between you and the baron and his brother. At home, in America, everybody's either a Republican or a Democrat, and of course they all vote against each other and call each other terrible names. But it doesn't really mean anything—they're just trying to get the farmers excited and fool the public. But even the ones that do the most of it against each other know it's all just a gorgeous bluff and they get together and joke about it. Why couldn't you do that here? It would be so much more comfortable; it seems to me you take things too seriously."

"Perhaps we do," he said; and he smiled, not finding any fault in her complete lack of comprehension. "It would not be easy to explain to a person from a country where everything is so comfortable. I am afraid we are worse than serious; for more than two thousand years we have even been passionate in our politics, and you see that makes it quite a habit."

"Then it seems to me time you got over it."

The young man was not displeased with her for her

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 flippancy. On the contrary, he gave her a look of appreciation from his fine dark eyes and laughed apologetically. "Well, you see, a habit more than two thousand years old—it is a little difficult to change! Would you consent to teach us, Miss Ambler?"

She instantly returned his glance, and then looked out over the sea. "You wouldn't pay much attention, I'm afraid," she said, with just the right proportions of amusement and wistfulness that she had learned to put into her voice when she wished gentlemen to be interested in finding out what she felt about them.

"No?" he said; and he responded perfectly to the sentimental mechanism she had set in motion. "If you will teach I fear I would pay no attention to anything else."

"Wouldn't you?" she asked, suddenly grave and sweet.

"Never! I never would!"

"Wouldn't you?" she said again, in a low voice. And with that she turned her head and gave him a quick, wondering look, a little startled, that seemed to say, "Will it be you—some day?"

This bit of performing was by no means all spurious—it was a mixture, being partly spontaneous and genuine, in spite of herself, as it always was when she

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 did it; and yet, of course, it was essentially a forward movement in her instinctive perpetual campaign to be a focus. But having made it, she felt that she had brought matters to a point a little further advanced than was desirable, at least for the time being; so she rose rather abruptly from the bench and leaned upon the precipice railing to gaze down at the sea.

"I think the Blue Grotto they have here is even more wonderful than the one at Capri," she said briskly. "My mother likes the Capresi one and we have the most fearful arguments about it." She turned about, facing him. "Which do you like best, Arturo?"

Arturo's colour had heightened; but now he looked a little mystified: "You didn't say if you would teach me."

She laughed gayly. "Oh, that! How to make people in this country understand not to take politics passionately? Well, I have an uncle at home that tried to be a senator, and he gave a dinner to the man that beat him—they said it was the funniest dinner ever given. Shall I ask Baron Bastoni to give you a dinner, Arturo? Do let me! We'd get that nice Mr. Rennie to be the toastmaster. He's so benevolent and witty"

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 She went on chattering while Arturo, who had risen when she did, stood looking at her helplessly and rather plaintively. Within her, she was a little derisive of his dejection. "He's really quite beautiful," she thought; "but he does look almost foolish just now—wanting to go on with it and not knowing how to make me! But that other man" As she stood with her back to the railing, the tail of her eye was taking ardent note of this magnetic other; and suddenly she decided upon a decisive step forward with him. Seeming to perceive for the first time the presence of Mr. Eugene Rennie, she gave him a surprised, sunny little nod; then let her kindled eyes rest for a slow moment upon the man in the long chair. She meant to exchange a first direct look with him—a look permitting him to guess that she hadn't minded his changing his table in the refectory—but Orbison chose this most special of moments to light a cigarette and he was entirely preoccupied in that worthless action.

"Good gracious!" Claire thought emotionally, "Just how slow are you intending to be? I'm not going to stay in Raona all my life! Aren't you ever going to do anything about it?"

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ER indignation was not lessened as days continued to pass and Mr. Charles Orbison still did nothing about it. Their first words and even their first glance remained yet to be exchanged, and under this strange provocation, Claire's imagination began to be seriously affected. At night she dreamed of him; by day she found herself thinking of him almost unremittently; and presently she realized that she had never before been so continually conscious of any man. She had fantastic thoughts about him; but she had no fear that she was fantastic in her conviction that he, on his part, was still continually observant of her.

Yet this perfectly sound conviction itself increased her fantasies: "Why don't you let me alone?" she said to him, during one of the imaginary conversations she frequently had with him. "I could have a much better time in all this gorgeousness of Raona if you'd just let me alone. The trouble is I can't quit thinking about you until you quit thinking about

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 me! Don't you see the thing is going too far?" And, indeed, by this time, she suspected that if the Englishman sat upon the bench with her and Arturo Liana looked on from a distance, she might be, for almost the first time in her life, more interested in the man at her side.

In her musings upon his unexampled behaviour, she sometimes murmured her thoughts, or even spoke them aloud; and thus, one afternoon, as she sat with her mother in the ancient cell that had been made into a small salon for them, she said dreamily, "Why doesn't he have Mr. Rennie ask us?"

Mrs. Ambler looked up from her embroidery in surprise. "Why doesn't who have Mr. Rennie ask us what?"

"That Englishman—Mr. Orbison. Why doesn't he have Mr. Rennie ask us to his villa to dine, or for tea, sometime when he's going there himself. I should think he would, since he's so anxious to meet us."

"Claire! What gives you the idea the poor man wants to know us?"

"Poor man?" Claire said sharply. "Why do you call him that?"

"Good gracious! He's a hopeless invalid, isn't he? He's the most tragically shattered"

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 "What!" the daughter cried. "Haven't you any eyes? He's the most magnificent-looking human creature I've ever seen!"

"What an idea! Why, he's a walking wreck, child—not that one doesn't feel awfully sorry for him. He just manages to get along with two canes, and he's thin as a shadow. Our valet de chambre says there's something the matter with his spine."

"Yes, there is." The colour had heightened in Claire's cheeks, and her eyes shone. "Do you know why? That's from a hand grenade in Flanders. I asked Mr. Rennie and he told me."

Mrs. Ambler nodded sympathetically. "Of course that does help to make him look magnificent, as you say; especially since anyone can see he's probably suffered terribly—and still does, I'm afraid. Yet he seems very much alive—that is, his head does. He has a kind of haggard eagerness very appealing; it's as if he knew he couldn't get much out of life, but did hope to get that little. I didn't realize you were interested in him; it's rather surprising in a girl of your age, especially with such a remarkable young man as Don Arturo hovering about."

"What's my age got to do with it, Mother? Arturo's wonderful, but I've seen others like him."

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 "Where? Indeed you haven't! He's the most charming young man I ever knew; and I've known more than you have, my dear! Mr. Rennie says he's the finest young man in Italy. His mother is lovely too."

"Yes," Claire said thoughtfully. "But I think she manœuvres a little."

"To make you like him? Well, that's natural, and a great compliment to you too. I think she's far from being mercenary; and her son hasn't a bit of that. No one could look at him for a moment and believe such a thing."

"No," Claire admitted. "It's true. He isn't that sort in the least, and I think he's splendid of course. I only meant I've seen others more like him than I have like Mr. Orbison. I've never seen anybody at all like Mr. Orbison. He's older, too, and that's rather fascinating—particularly when a girl's seen so terribly many fledglings of about her own age."

Mrs. Ambler sighed. "Oh, dear! What makes you think the poor man wants to meet—us? I haven't seen him show the slightest symptom."

"He had his table changed to the one next to ours, didn't he?"

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 "It's nearer the door and he doesn't have to hobble so far with his two sticks."

"Mother!" Claire exclaimed, and she uttered a sound of pity. "He doesn't mind! He goes on fairly long walks with that dowdy sister of his, in spite of his two sticks. I've about made up my mind to ask Mr. Rennie to"

"You mustn't," her mother interrupted in alarm. "Claire, please! We don't know Mr. Rennie well enough, and I'm sure he'd understand what you're up to."

Up to'?" the girl repeated, with an almost perfect air of wondering incredulity. "Mr. Rennie would understand what I'm 'up to'? What in the world are you talking about?"

"Oh, dear! Whenever you begin to be hypocritical with me, I know there's no chance of doing anything with you."

"Why, yes, there is," Claire said surprisingly. "I won't ask Mr. Rennie; I've just decided not to."

"Then it's because you've decided on something worse. What that poor man and his sister desire is rest and seclusion, and heaven knows he needs it! I think you ought to let him alone."

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 "Good heavens!" Claire cried, and she laughed a little excitedly. "What on earth do you think I intend to do, Mother?"

Mrs. Ambler's reply was almost too frank. "I think you've just decided on a more picturesque way of meeting poor Mr. Orbison than by asking Mr. Rennie."

"What nonsense!" the daughter exclaimed, as she rose from her chair by a window overlooking the garden. "All I've decided to do is to go up to the Salone for the afternoon tea dance. Arturo hates the place and made a fuss about my going there; but it's perfectly all right. Giuseppe Bastoni will be waiting to take me by the time I get my hat on; the baron's going to meet us there, and they both do dance beautifully. Don't worry about my disturbing poor Mr. Orbison!"

"I might as well not, I suppose," her mother sighed. "Especially since I know now what you've decided to do at the first opportunity—and that you'll probably make the opportunity, yourself!"

Claire was already in the adjoining room, engaged before a mirror. "You wicked person!" she called through the open doorway. "You mean I'll make the opportunity to meet Mr. Orbison in a more pictur-

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 esque way, don't you? I should think you'd be afraid to put such ideas into my head, especially in the most picturesque place in the world, where one really ought to do picturesque things! Of course you understand that if I did anything like that now, after your suggesting it, the whole affair would be absolutely all your fault." And a few moments later, as her mother remained persistently silent, Claire added gayly, speaking loudly in order to be sure that her impudence was understood: "Did you hear what I said? I said 'the whole affair,' Mother. Once you put such things into my head, you never can tell where they'll end!"

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] there are 14 rings, but only a few may be caught at a single throw. A certain number of marks, 2, 3, or 4, agreed upon in advance, constitute the game. These marks are made upon a diagram laid out in the sand in the form of a whorl (fig. 97). The scoring commences in the center, called the tcnni ki, "council house," and runs out to the last hole, called hoholdega ki, "menstrual house," which is on the west side of the diagram; then the score returns to the center before the player is entitled to one point toward game. If the player who is behind throws a number that brings her counter to the same hole as that of her opponent she "kills" the latter and sends back her counter to the beginning point, but this is not done if she passes her opponent's position.

Two specimens were obtained at Sacaton which were probably used in games by the Hohokam, illustrations of which are here presented for the benefit of those engaged in special researches concerning gaming devices.

One of these objects is a cup-shaped stone of lava which was obtained from a Pima who had found it in one of the Gila Valley ruins west of the Casa Grande (fig. 98). Doctor Fewkes has called the writer's attention to the fact that it resembles the wooden cups used by the Hopis in a game not unlike the European "shell game."

A few rings of porous lava have been found about the ruins which have been called "head rings" because of their resemblance to the ordinary head rings of cloth or bark in common use among the Pimas (fig. 99). However, as most of them are too small and the material is extremely unsuited for such a purpose it is much more probable that they were employed in some game with which the present race is unacquainted.

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HE Salone is one thing not beautiful in Raona, though the gay little modern building is inconspicuous and may be pleasantly approached through a cypress-bordered garden. What should not be in Raona is the interior of the Salone; the manufactured throbbings of a "night club" are misplaced upon the majestic cliff that looked down upon the passing of Odysseus.

Arturo Liana hated the Salone, yet he was there, this afternoon, at a table near the door, and alone. At the opposite end of the room an orchestra of red-coated men produced adroitly suggestive tango music, to which the silent dancers moved with what seemed to Arturo a snaky accuracy. Most of the women were pale under heavily applied artificial complexions that the red lamps failed to make plausible; the men were pale, too, and there was no merriment in this sleek dancing, but, on the contrary, a trancelike gravity—a gravity as of pallid masks covering intricate and sly emotions. Slyness seemed the very air of the place; it

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 was the key of the music; it was in the curiously revealing dresses of some of the women as well as in their eyes; most of all, Arturo thought, it was in the eyes of that sly enemy of his, Giuseppe Bastoni, with whom Claire Ambler was dancing.

Alone, of all the dancers, the young American girl seemed to be dancing merely to dance and not for the sake of something covert. She laughed and chattered to her partner; her blue eyes, under her silver-gray helmet of silk, were bright with pleasure in the rhythms measured by her feet that moved so lightly in their twinkling slim black slippers. She was gay as a child is gay; and in all this vulpine slyness, she was the only frank and natural young creature. It hurt Arturo to see her there—as he knew she knew it did, which made his hurt the keener; and yet he saw that she could go anywhere and everywhere untouched by what was about her. It was probably an American quality, he thought; but he nevertheless wished that she were not so willing to go anywhere and everywhere, or at least, would be kinder to one adviser in such matters. She had been a little brusque when he advised her, that morning, not to go to the Salone.

However, she unexpectedly atoned for her brusqueness now. She had not seen him when he came in, nor

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 while she danced; but with the stopping of the music, she and her partner were left just before Arturo's table. She turned and uttered a little cry of pleased surprise.

"Arturo! I didn't dream you'd deign to come here after what you How lovely! Wouldn't you like to offer Giuseppe and me some tea at your table?"

Arturo had risen, and he bowed rather ceremoniously. "I should be very glad."

Claire sat down at once; but Bastoni, with a bow more ceremonious than the young Liano's, begged to decline. "I mus' speak wit' my brozzer," he said; and through his monocle there flickered at Arturo a cold glance oddly contemplative. For a moment Claire was puzzled to find herself feeling uncomfortable. There seemed to be, somewhere about her, a tensity that might have consequences; but Arturo stood imperturbable, looking straight before him and not at Bastoni; then he sat down and Bastoni went quietly away.

"I'm afraid he doesn't like it very much," Claire said thoughtfully. "I told him and the baron I didn't want any tea. Well, it won't matter; I'll be nice to them later. Why in the world did you scold me for wanting to come to this interesting place? The music's

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 really great, and these extraordinary foreign types—I wouldn't have missed it for anything! What's the matter with it?"

"Nothing, as you see it. You only see it as interestingly foreign. There are undercurrents—undercurrents that I know."

"Are there?" Claire laughed as she cast a lively glance about the room. "There's one that I see. Every woman in the place is covertly looking at you and hoping you'll dance with her. Do you see that?"

"No," he said. "But a few of the men are looking at me by no means so flatteringly."

"Are they? Arturo, at your age I should think it would be much more fun to drop politics and just have a great time. You're so serious!"

"I fear so," he said, and shook his head ruefully. "How can I be anything but serious when you behave to me in such a manner that you do?"

"I? Why, I think I'm perfectly heavenly to you!"

"Too much so, indeed! But that is in my own appreciation of you. I spoke of how you behave toward me. You snub me for my advice and you come to this absurd and unworthy place with such people as the Bastoni. Then you immediately drop them when you see me sitting alone here and unhappy

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 and I am glad to say that fellow will now be twice as much my enemy as before—and you come to sit with me. But pretty soon you will go and dance with one of those fellows again; so it is all too much up and down!"

"Arturo!" she cried; and she added disingenuously: "I haven't an idea what you're talking about!"

He smiled sadly. "I was so flatter' that you call me 'Arturo'—until I found you call the Bastoni, also, by their firs' names."

"But that's nothing! At home we all do that—with everybody."

"Yes, I understand," he said. "That was what remove' my happiness in it. It was only one of the downs that come between the ups. You will let me explain what I mean by the ups and downs? I think you know very well what thoughts I have about you; but I cannot speak clearly of them to you until you let me see they would be agreeable to you. Well, you will not let me find that out. One hour you lif' me up to where I begin to think you will be not displeased if I speak of what I feel; and the next hour, you send me down to where I find nothing but a confusion in my mind. You see, I am a little baffle' and not very happy; it seems to me I have no advantage

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 over even the Bastoni. So far as I can tell you have this same treatment for any man whatever."

"Good gracious!" Claire exclaimed. "You are a serious boy! And you must think I'm a very uninventive sort of person, if I have only the one trick to show all gentlemen! Indeed, I'm not the same to the Bastoni that I am to you! They're only fun for me, don't you see? They amuse me because they're so foreign and different—I really let 'em hang around partly to listen to their funny accent. Mother and I scream over them when we're alone! They haven't had the advantage of a year in London that you had, Arturo. I don't think they've ever been out of Raona."

"Oh, yes," he said dryly. "They go to Naples sometime'."

"Well, that doesn't help their English accent much!" Claire laughed. "You don't think I really care anything about them, do you?"

"You came here with them when I begged you not to do it."

"Just for fun, yes," she said, and then, seeming to become serious, she leaned toward him across the small table. "You don't really mind, do you?"

He looked at her steadily. "Will you let me take you back to your hotel now?"

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 "I couldn't be that rude to them, I'm afraid," she said, and then, as he laughed shortly, and with some bitterness, she said quickly, "Why don't you stay and dance with me too?"

"No," he answered. "I will not dance here, even with you. Later, I think I could offer you something better. There is another orchestra in Raona; it is just of mandolins and violins and guitars, and I am afraid they play rather sentimental music; but they know how, and the sentiment is pure. They are giving a moonlight concert in the Greek theatre to-night. Will you come with me?"

"It sounds lovely," she said; then she thought that if she went with him she would not be where Orbison could watch her in the corridor after dinner. Therefore she began to look conscientious. "I'm afraid my mother expects me not to go out this evening. I'm afraid I really ought to spend it with her; but you could dine with us, couldn't you? Won't you, Arturo? You will, won't you?"

She entreated him in a pretty and coaxing voice; Arturo was pleased to forget the concert, and accept. "You are very kind," he said. "I can hope that to-night will be one of the ups; so I will go now and dream of it. You are about to be ask' to dance again."

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 The older Bastoni, in fact, was already bowing before her as Arturo spoke; and Claire jumped up gayly; but gave her table companion a soft glance and a little nod, for au revoir, over the baron's shoulder. Arturo, standing, responded formally, and summoned a waiter to bring his account.

"Liana not stay long," the baron remarked. "I did not ever see 'im in our Salone before. 'E iss very—how you say? Severe? Yes. 'E iss severe young mans."

"Oh, no," Claire laughed. "He isn't severe."

"Not?"

"No; he just looked so to-day," she said, and she added thoughtlessly, "It was only because he didn't want me to come here and he was a little cross."

E advice you not to come?" Bastoni asked in a casual and commonplace tone. "Wit' my brozzer?"

His voice was so well modulated to the note of a mild and indifferent inquiry, made merely for the sake of saying something, that she failed to perceive a particular significance in his question. Dance music always made her as light-headed as she was light-footed, her mother sometimes told her with no great exaggeration. "Arturo says this is a terrible joint," she laughed. "I think it's huge fun, myself. There

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 aren't any places like this in Naples, are there?"

"Naple'?" Bastoni said in the same tone of commonplace inquiry. "Liana tell you I go to Naple'?"

"Yes. Don't you?" she asked, a little surprised; and he misinterpreted the slight widening of her eyes—it seemed to him that she was laughing at him secretly. As Eugene Rennie had told his friend in the hotel garden, the Bastoni sometimes sold a ring or a brooch or a necklace to the foreign ladies with whom they danced. The jewel was always represented as an unobtainable antique, a Bastoni heirloom, and after an adroit temptation, the sale was made with the air of indulgent protest. Moreover, the two brothers had hoped to interest Miss Ambler and her mother in the possession of several such heirlooms, though they had even greater hopes than this; but the baron knew that the Neapolitan origin of the jewellery was no longer wholly a secret between him and his brother—the Raonese are devoted gossips, and the truth concerning the Bastoni heirlooms was something of a joke in their cafés. Familiars in Raona, especially Italians, like Liana, might easily know all about it; and the baron guessed that Arturo, for his own purposes, had betrayed him and had warned the American girl. In the morning, evidently, he had begged

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 her not to go to the Salone; then he had come there himself and told her that the brothers dealt in spurious antique jewellery, made in Naples. Arturo was objectionably dangerous politically; but this personal interference was too much.

"Nossing to see in Naple'," Bastoni said, placidly gliding in the tango. "I sink Tunis more interessing. You been Tunis? Not? Zis fine floor for dance on. You sink so?"

Claire nodded gayly, unaware that she had come in contact with one of the undercurrents Arturo had mentioned. All the while, this afternoon, beneath the surface of her thoughts, she was engaged with an undercurrent of her own; and whatever she said to Arturo or to the Bastoni was but inconsequent prattle, wholly without any fruitful significance, she would have sworn. What preoccupied her, happily, and with the forerunning excitement of the approach to an adventure, was that idea she had so merrily charged her mother with putting into her head. In the most picturesque place in the world an intelligent girl oughtn't to find it difficult to arrange a picturesque way of meeting a disabled gentleman, she thought.

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ITHOUT a definite plan for converting her idea into action Claire Ambler left everything to the spur of the moment; but she had determined to spur the moment. She therefore made herself befittingly picturesque for dinner that evening, in a beaded dress as shining as pale-blue armour, and almost as heavy in spite of its scantness; and she added to this the splendid faded gorgeousness of a fine old Spanish shawl. Thus, when she came into the ancient refectory with Arturo and her mother, she was at least as vivid as she could have cared to be. "Like a florist's window," said Eugene Rennie, who was dining with his English friends. "Flowers, too, can carry that much colour and only make you glad to look at them."

Then, as she reached her table close by, Claire paused before she seated herself and, instead of merely nodding, she prettily made him an odd little curtsy. "Extraordinary child!" he murmured to his two companions. "I think I join you, Charles, in

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14 the figure,) lay in the inner surface of the young cell. It must remain a question whether the nucleus is really wanting, or whether it is only not visible in consequence of its translucency, or whether these corpuscles are developed into the nucleus. The chorda dorsalis accords with the vegetable cells, at least in this respect, that young cells are formed within the old ones.

With regard to the thickening of the cell walls; these appear to remain always simple (unchanged) in the chorda dorsalis of the larva of the frog. But in the fully developed osseous fishes, in Cyprinus, for example, a thickening is exhibited in those cells which lie near the axis of the conical interspaces of the vertebræ. The cell-cavities always become smaller in consequence of this thickening of the walls. The thickened walls, or the intermediate substance between the cell cavities consist of closely cohering longitudinal fibres, between which very fine transverse fibres are also sometimes seen. The longitudinal fibres run uninterruptedly past several cells; and the primitive membrane of each cell can no longer be distinguished.

To sum up the researches upon the chorda dorsalis in a few words; it may be said to consist of polyhedral cells, which have, in or on the internal surface of their walls, a structure, according in its form and position with the nucleus of the cells of plants, namely, an oval flat disc containing one, two, or more rarely three nucleoli. The cells usually lie in close contact with each other; but sometimes at points where three or more cells meet together, a sort of intercellular substance, or an intercellular passage is seen. Young cells, which are at first round, and float free, are formed within parent cells. Nuclei of the characteristic form, are not distinctly observed in these young cells, but sometimes a small globule lies upon their inner surface. In those cells which undergo further development, the cell-membrane ceases to exist as a distinct structure, and the intermediate substance between the cell cavities consists for the most part of longitudinal fibres.

With the exception of the formation of these fibres, into the origin of which I have not yet examined, and the absence of the nucleus in the young cells, these cells entirely accord with the vegetable cells. It must remain undecided whether the nucleus is really wanting in these young cells, as it is not yet proved to exist in all plants, (for example in many acotyledo-


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 wondering what goes on in 'that young head.' Something charming evidently. Certainly that impulsive little curtsy was charming."

Claire, also, thought it was charming, and with good reason. Not ten minutes earlier she had made this same impulsive little curtsy—the last of a series—to the mirror in her own room; but she had not reproduced it for Mr. Eugene Rennie's benefit. "Well, did you like it?" she was saying mentally to Orbison, as she began to talk vivaciously to Arturo Liana. "If you didn't, what's the matter with it! Anyhow, though I don't know just what it'll be, I'm going to do something you will like, pretty soon!"

But the opportunity her mother had prophesied she would make was obviously not to be contrived during the hour she sat at dinner; picturesque conjunctions are not easily available at such times. Moreover, when she and Mrs. Ambler and Arturo came out into the long corridor afterward, for coffee, she was disturbed to see nothing of the trio who had occupied the next table and preceded them, by a few minutes, from the refectory. She looked about her blankly; but a little later, when coffee had been brought and Arturo was presenting a lighted match to the end of her cigarette, she caught sight of Orbison

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 at the other end of the corridor. He was wrapped in a long ulster, with a heavy woollen muffler about his throat, and with his American friend beside him he was hobbling toward the passage that led to the cloister and the great outer gates. This was the first time the invalid had gone forth in the evening, and Claire jumped to a conclusion.

She stared, neglecting the match, though Arturo held it for her until it scorched his fingers. "They must be—they're going up to the Greek theatre!" she said under her breath.

"Who?" her mother inquired.

"What?" Claire said hazily.

"I understood you to say somebody was going up to the Greek theatre."

"Yes," the girl returned quickly. "Everybody is. There's a concert and it's a glorious night—the most wonderful full moon—I saw it from my window even before dinner. Mother, you wouldn't mind, would you?"

"Mind what?" Mrs. Ambler asked, surprised by the unusual stress her daughter put upon this petition. "What do you mean?"

For a moment Claire looked slightly confused, and she glanced hastily at Arturo. "Mother, I know I

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 ought to stay here with you; of course I practically promised to"

"Why, no," Mrs. Ambler said. "When did you?"

"This afternoon. I really did mean to spend the evening here with you; but Arturo asked me, and I know he'd like to go. Would you mind if we went to that concert at the Greek theatre?"

"Why, certainly not," the mystified lady returned. "Why should I?"

Claire jumped up instantly. "Get your hat and coat," she said to Arturo. "I won't need more than this shawl. It's the most heavenly night!"

"Heavenly" was a word she repeated as they walked through the stone streets of the old town, and she said it again as they began the ascent of the great ruins of the theatre. "We must go clear up to the top," she said. "Oh, this heavenly place and this heavenly night!"

Other figures were climbing with them, shadowy and murmuring, no one speaking loudly among these gigantic and august relics. "The people are like ghosts of the ancients," Arturo said in a low voice. "They climb so quietly and they are all so dim, they might be the shades of those old, old audiences who came here on such a night two thousand years ago. How

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 still and mysterious it is! There could be thousands of people here in these tremendous shadows and we would not know it."

"It's heavenly!" she sighed again; and at last they came out upon the stone platform of the huge gallery the Romans had superimposed upon the Greek structure. Here they were at the top of the theatre—upon its crest and upon the crest of precipices, with an incredible world about them, and the sea, shining and soundless, far, far below. Claire looked across the classic strait to the mountains shimmering there in luminous haze, then to left and right at the unending crescents of coastline based with white, twinkling surf and crowned with the diamond-point lights of mountain villages; but, nearer and seeming so close at hand that it was startling, the vast triangular symmetry of the volcano reposed, ivory-coloured, in the sky; and when Claire saw above its snows a faint rosy glow upon the rising masses of smoke, she found her sighing not eloquent enough. "I must do one of two things," she said. "I must either sing or I must cry!"

She said it in a whisper, for although vague groupings of motionless people could be seen here and there among the antique tiers of seats, and upon the heights

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 of the ruinous gallery corridor, there was a silence over the place. Deep in the shadow, far below, upon the ancient stage where the sonorous measures of Euripides had once been spoken by masked lips, there was a cluster of tiny golden lights, the lamps of the orchestra; and presently these native musicians began to play.

As Arturo said, what they played was sentimental; but it was pure, and they knew how. They were of a race that has music in its heart and art in its fingers; so now this orchestra of a dozen violins and mandolins with half as many 'cellos and guitars and a flute, played old moonlight themes, sonatas, serenades, and gentle nocturnes, but played them so that a listener who had long since tired of them might well have thought he had never heard them played before. The brilliant night was still, save for this music floating up to the motionless, shadowy groups of people on the lofty platform of the open gallery; no other sound could they hear in all the endless space of land and sea revealed to them from that height; and thus the whole world seemed to have been hushed into a spellbound listening.

Claire stood leaning upon a massive and rugged cube of fallen masonry. "I've never known anything

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 like this before—never!" she whispered to Arturo. "I never thought there could be a moonlight night when the moon wasn't the most beautiful thing in it. To-night it's just a lamp to give illumination. Do you suppose they'll play the Pastorale? I've learned it, and if they play it I'm afraid I couldn't help singing it. I honestly believe I couldn't keep it under!"

She had been in earnest when she said that she must either sing or weep; a song was in her throat, and like those Raonese musicians down by the small golden sparks, she "knew how." Somewhere among the mysterious, still figures of the listeners was the man of whom she so continually found herself thinking—because, perhaps, he thought of her; but just for this while she had forgotten that she deliberately intended a picturesque meeting with him. An overpowering sense of beauty was upon her; wings seemed to flutter ineffably in her breast; and almost unbearably she wanted to sing with the music that came lifting and lifting to the height where she stood.

She was trembling.

"It will be beautiful if you sing," Arturo said. "There is no reason you should not."

Down in the deep semicircular shadow of the amphitheatre they began to play the Pastorale; and

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 then—at first almost without the listeners' being aware of it—a lovely sound came from no one could say where; it grew clearer, and was heard over all the great space of the theatre, yet was never loud. It seemed a natural part of the beauty of that night—this voice out of the silvered heavens overhead, singing the melody of the Pastorale.

No one except Arturo Liana and the singer herself knew who sang; least of all was she guessed by the man to whom she sang; but she had in store for her the stirring experience of hearing him describe what she had done.

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HE sat by her open window, breakfasting languidly, when she discovered that he was just below her. His long chair had been placed in the sunshine of the upper terrace beneath the window, though she did not know this until she heard his sister giving him a morning greeting there.

"You don't think you were indiscreet to venture out into the night air, Charles?" Miss Orbison said; and a scraping upon the gravel indicated that she dragged one of the iron chairs with her, and came to sit beside him. "You don't look the worse, I'm sure."

"No. What difference would it make if I did?" he returned, with a short laugh. "When one's certain to be worse before long in any event, what difference is it if one's worse a day or two sooner?"

Miss Orbison protested gently. "Ah, don't say that, Charles!"

"No. Perhaps it's just as well unsaid. It's better to leave the most of what we know about some things

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 unsaid, of course; so forgive me. At any rate, last night made me glad I'd hung on at least till then. I was no end sorry you hadn't overlooked your cold and come with us."

"Really! It was quite what Mr. Rennie said it would be, then?"

"Quite! You could add something to that, if you cared to."

"Really! What was it like, Charles?"

"I couldn't possibly tell you," he said. "It was one of those things you have to see and hear yourself; you'll get only a feeble water colour of it from me. I think a chap like Beethoven might have put it into music; but I doubt if Robert Browning could have done it in verse."

"Really! It was as impressive as all that?"

Impressive, he said, and laughed again briefly, in his discontent with her word. "Would you say that of the volcano yonder? Last night I thought it was the tent of Zeus and that the god himself was in bivouac there. We sat where Cicero had sat, I think; and long before him, Plato. It seemed to me I could see processions of all the dead Greeks who had sat in that theatre; they came sweeping up out of the sea and down out of the sky on the shafts of moon-

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 shine. They were shaped of that light, themselves, and they took their old places in the theatre they must have dearly loved, since they built it upon the most magnificent site in the world. You'd have thought then that only a great chant should have come up to us from the stage; that anything less wouldn't have been bearable. No, it wasn't so. The music was transfigured, translated out of itself into something almost intolerably beautiful. And then, when they played the Pastorale, there came a sweet, carolling voice from the air—a woman's voice singing as a nightingale sings, not singing to be heard, but just out of its own heart—and sang the Pastorale with them. You couldn't tell where she sat or stood, or in what part of the theatre she was; and you didn't want to know: she was doing simply the loveliest thing a human being ever did, and you had no wish to see her or even to learn who she was. What she did, itself, was enough. For me"

"Yes? For you, Charles?" his sister asked, as he paused.

"For me," he answered, "it was the final loveliness in the hour of greatest sheer beauty I've ever known in my life. One doesn't want to touch such a thing at all."

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 "No," Miss Orbison said sympathetically. "Of course not, Charles."

But the girl near the window above them held to a different way of thinking; she was not of the age when such a thing is to be left untouched. She sat for a little while, breathing rapidly, her eyes brilliant and her colour deep, in her delight; then, as the sister and brother fell silent, devoting their attention to the landscape, or to reverie, she moved silently out of her chair, and stole to the mirror across the room. Smiling rapturously upon it she let her finger tips rest upon their reflected fellows: "You certainly did something!" she whispered to her counterpart. Then she let her green Chinese wrapper slide down from her, and began to dress.

Before she had quite finished she heard Miss Orbison speaking again, but not from beneath the window; evidently she was at a little distance.

"I'll be back before lunch, Charles," she said. "You can call to one of the gardeners to fetch Agostino if you need anything. You're sure you"

"Of course," her brother interrupted a little irritably. "I sha'n't need you. I'm not flat on my back, yet. Do go along!"

Miss Orbison went, and Claire stepped noiselessly

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 to the window. Orbison was reclining just below in the warm full sunshine, with his heavy rug pulled close about him; and no one else was upon the upper terrace or in the pergola that bordered it. Gardeners were at work among the flower beds beyond the terrace; and a group of German travellers stood talking by the railing above the precipice; but at that distance their voices were not heard more loudly here than the droning of the bees among the flowering vines that grew upon the old stone walls of the hotel. Smoke massed itself placidly upon the shoulders of the volcano; hazy cliffs of lilac rose from a pale-blue sea, and the air seemed gilded with the southern morning sunlight. No young heroine of a romantic drama could have wished a stage better set for her entrance.

Claire selected the prettiest pair of patent-leather slippers that she owned, and, seated upon a stool before her dressing table, thoughtfully put them on. "Now where you going to take me?" she whispered excitedly to her feet, when they were thus becomingly encased.

But, as she well knew they would, they took her to the pergola upon the upper terrace. She appeared there a few minutes later, bright-eyed, high-coloured,

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 altogether charming, with a small red book in her hand; and, after a musing and impersonal glance about her, which appeared to reveal nothing to detain her interest, she seated herself upon a bench beneath the shading vines. She sat in profile to the Englishman, and only a few paces distant from him; she had no doubt of his attention, nor that he knew she was conscious of it. Her lively heart made her aware of its beating; but she turned over the pages of her book with a steady, graceful little hand; and then, with her downcast eyes upon the turning pages, she began to sing the Pastorale in a low, sweet voice, as if little more than humming the melody to herself. Yet she made it clear enough, she was sure.

When she had sung it through, her colour was even higher than before, and she held her book so near to her eyes that she seemed almost to bury her blushing face in it. This was something she had not expected—a moment of fluttering panic—but she bravely lowered the book and slowly turned her head to face him.

Orbison was looking at her intently, with that eagerness in his haggard eyes her mother had said was "as if he knew he couldn't get much out of life but did hope to get that little."

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 For a long moment they looked at each other; then she rose and went slowly toward him until she stood at his feet.

"I'm glad you liked it, Mr. Orbison," she said. "It was meant for you."

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E MADE a movement to rid himself of his rug and rise; but she stepped forward quickly. "No—please! May I sit here a little while?"

"Yes—you may," he said, with his short laugh. "On the whole, I think you may!" Then he added, as she took the chair his sister had left beside him, "What were you glad I liked?"

"Don't you know?"

"You were humming the Pastorale. Did you mean that?"

"Yes, Mr. Orbison."

"You were at the Greek theatre last night, I suppose?"

"Why—yes. I was there."

"How did you know I liked it?"

She made a gesture toward the open window above them. "That's my room. I heard you telling your sister."

"I see," he said. "But what did you mean by say-

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 ing the Pastorale was meant for me? That's what you said, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you meant your humming it just now was meant for me?"

"Yes—but I meant last night."

"Why, how could that be?" he asked, and he stared at her, seeming puzzled. "I don't know a dozen people in Raona; and certainly not anyone who could sing the Pastorale like that. Most assuredly, I don't know any woman who would be thinking of me when she did it. What do you mean, Miss Ambler?"

Claire stared at him incredulously; then she realized that a free, full voice in the moonlight over a Greek ruin might seem so much a part of the transfiguring night that it would not be recognized when it sang just audibly in the daytime and in another place, even though it sang the same song. The piquant little drama she had just played for him was a failure.

"You American ladies do like to mystify us slower mortals, I've observed," Orbison said. "How could that unknown singer have meant her song for me, Miss Ambler?"

"I" She hesitated. She had an impulse to burst out at him: "I was your unknown singer! I

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 guess I ought to know who I sang for, oughtn't I?" The words were almost upon her lips; but she withheld them. "All right, then!" she thought. "You wouldn't see it when I took the trouble to show you, I'm not going to be banal enough to tell you; so you can just find it out for yourself! It gives me a secret that I know and you don't; and that's an advantage over you, anyhow." This was her feeling, and it appeared to imply that she engaged in some form of contest. All her affairs with gentlemen, in fact, seemed to involve this sense of contest, which was so persistent that it could be present even now, when the gentleman was an invalid.

"You don't answer me," he said.

She smiled vaguely. "Well—didn't everyone there last night have the feeling that the song and all the rest of it had a special meaning for himself alone? I'm sure I did. That's what I tried to convey by saying it was meant for you. Every one of us could think so, couldn't we?"

"Dear me!" he said. "I suppose we could if we had the necessary amount of egoism. But when that wonderful lady sang last night I got entirely away from my own egoism for a while. You see it's rather necessary for me to think of myself as little as possi-

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 ble. I fix my attention upon other things when I can; and that reminds me—I'm in great fear that I owe you an apology."

"Do you? What for?"

"I think you know."

"No; I don't."

"Yes," he said. "I think you do. You see, it happens that I've become merely some broken machinery about ready to be tossed out on the junk pile"

"Mr. Orbison!" she cried, protesting; and she leaned toward him, her eyes shining. "You haven't any right to speak of yourself like that."

"Haven't I? It's what I am, my dear young lady."

"No! I know how you got your hurt. Heroes aren't broken machinery, Mr. Orbison!"

"Oh, dear me!" he laughed. "You're very old-fashioned. But what I was trying to say is that even when one can't take part in life any longer, one can't help watching it. Life for an invalid becomes a looking on at the lives of others—at least it does for the kind of invalid I've found myself to be. Well, I've been looking on at you, Miss Ambler, and I think I should ask your pardon for it."

"Do you?" She looked at him gravely. "Why?"

"You're very kind," he said. "Nevertheless, I

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OF CARTILAGE. nous plants,) or whether the little corpuscle, which presents itself on the inner surface of some young cells, is the nucleus which grows with the cell, as it is observed to do in some other animal cells; or whether the nucleus in the young cells is invisible in consequence of its translucency, since even fully-developed cells are met with, in which, although certainly present, it is, in consequence of its transparency, barely visible.

The accordance of the structure of cartilage with the tissue of plants is of more importance in reference to animal organization. We have here to do not only with a more widely extended animal tissue, but also with one which, at least, in its subsequent stages of development, contains vessels, and therefore bears more decidedly the character of an animal tissue. The simplest form of cartilage is exhibited in the cartilages of the branchial rays of fishes. If, for example, a branchial ray of Cyprinus erythrophthalmus be loosened from the branchial arch, and the mucous membrane be removed by gentle scraping, the cartilage remaining presents the appearance of a little rod, which diminishes from the point of its insertion on the branchial arch towards its free end, its sides being somewhat compressed, and exhibiting on their margins some blunt prominences. The structure of this cartilage is very simple. At the point it perfectly resembles, in its whole appearance, the parenchymatous cellular tissue of plants. (See pl. I, fig. 5, from the above-mentioned Cyp. eryth.) Little polyhedral cell-cavities with rounded corners are seen lying closely together. The cell-cavities are separated from each other by extremely thin partition walls. The cell-contents are transparent, and a small pale round nucleus (a) may be seen in some cells when in the recent state, in others only after the action of water upon them. The structure of the lateral prominences of the cartilage is similar to that at the point, only that the cells are somewhat extended in length. Advancing from that point towards the middle, or still better from the point towards the root of the branchial ray, the partition walls of the cell-cavities are observed to become gradually thicker ; and the cavities are here somewhat smaller. (Pl. I, fig. 6.) On the thickened cell-walls it may now also be seen


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 think I should. Ever since I first saw you one morning here in the garden, I'm afraid you've been the central figure in all my looking-on in Raona. What's more, I've had the feeling that you knew it; that you were entirely conscious of it; and so"

"Yes, it's true," she interrupted. "Yes, I knew you were watching me—and thinking of me, a little, too, perhaps. Were you?"

"Yes," he said, as a faint colour came into his pale cheeks. "Not thinking of you a little, though. You see as an invalid"

"As an invalid?" she repeated; and she laughed. "If you did it only as an invalid, perhaps you might owe me an apology, Mr. Orbison! But anyhow, your watching me—so much—and my knowing it—so well—does seem to bring us together as already comfortably intimate, doesn't it?"

"Yes, I hope so."

"Well, then, when you watched me—and thought a little about me—what did you see and what did you think?"

"You'd really like me to tell you?"

"If you think I can stand it—yes."

"Well" He paused, frowning. "Last night Mr. Rennie and I talked about you all the way to the

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 Greek theatre—and you know I walk slowly! You see, you mystify me and"

"No!" she exclaimed. "Isn't that lovely! Do I? How?"

"In every way; but in particular about a detail of your conduct that Mr. Rennie and I were discussing, Miss Ambler."

"Indeed? So you weren't just talking of me; you were discussing me! What was the detail of my conduct you had the debate about?"

He shook his head dubiously. "I'm afraid you won't like it. Mr. Rennie had been dining with the Principessa Liana. The apple of her eye, it appears, is her youngest son, who's spent the last two winters with her here at their villa. I'm afraid the princess doesn't think you've been making Don Arturo very happy, Miss Ambler."

"Doesn't she?" Claire said quickly. "Does she consider that my special privilege?"

"No more than you consider it a special privilege for me to be talking to you about it," he returned. "But you remember you asked me to tell you?"

"Yes. I invited it. Please go on. What else did Mr. Rennie say?"

"He said he feared young Liana was taking things

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 rather hard. He's a serious youngster, and once or twice I've been a little sorry for him, Miss Ambler."

"You have?" Claire said; and she looked at him darkly. "I suppose you mean when you've seen him with me?"

"No." Orbison shook his head. "When I've seen him not with you. When he's with you he looks anxious; but when he's away from you he looks like Hamlet!"

"Of course you mean you consider me responsible for how he looks. Is the way Arturo looks the reason I mystify you?"

"It's part of it, yes," the invalid answered. "In the first place, one can't easily imagine so splendid-looking a young man as that being allowed to look like Hamlet. One would think"

"That I'd fairly jump at such a chance!" Claire finished for him, as he hesitated. "I mystify you because I don't jump, I suppose?"

"A little, yes; but there's something more. You meant for me to speak out, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, one always wonders whether or not American girls are as democratic at home as they are abroad. It's the most curious thing—you seem to

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 think all 'foreigners' equally desirable as acquaintances and escorts if they're able to make what seems to you a presentable appearance. What I could never puzzle out"

But she interrupted him again, and this time she laughed. "Oh, now I see what you're talking about and I know what you and Mr. Rennie were discussing—and probably what's worrying the Principessa. You mean the baron and his brother, Giuseppe. You're talking about my distressing Arturo by playing around with the two Bastoni, aren't you?"

"I suppose so; yes."

She nodded, laughed again and went on: "You and the princess and Mr. Rennie—and, incidentally, my mother—can't understand how I could waste my time going places with the Bastoni and letting them hang about me here, when there's such a splendid young man as Arturo available. That's it, isn't it? In the first place, you wonder why I don't accept him, and in the second, why I annoy him by seeing something of two men he despises. Well, since that's my mystery, I'll clear it up for you, Mr. Orbison. You've been such an attentive audience, I think I owe it to you. I haven't accepted Don Arturo because he hasn't proposed to me."

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 "What! But his mother"

"She didn't tell Mr. Rennie her son had proposed to me, Mr. Orbison."

"But"

"Oh, dear me!" she cried, and her laughter sounded gayly desperate. "I don't deny he wants to. I haven't let him."

"But that's the same thing, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't. If I'd let him go that far it would mean I intended him to, and I don't. I think that's clear enough on this point, Mr. Orbison. About the Bastoni, the honest truth is that I think they're terribly amusing—I like to dance with 'em and they speak the funniest English I ever heard. Arturo's nice, but he isn't funny—and they are! That's all there is to my mystery, Mr. Orbison."

He stared at her from under deeply frowning eyebrows; and she was amazed to see that he was serious; she had thought he would laugh with her. "You" he said. "It's astounding! It's like a" He stopped, frowned even more harshly, and then asked: "Would you care to hear what you remind me of?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "You don't look as if it were anything very encouraging. But perhaps—since you've begun it"

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 "You remind me of a child I saw in Flanders one day. She was a little bright-eyed dancing sort of fairy creature and she'd got hold of some things it amused her to play with. They were new shells, charged with high explosives, and she was having a beautiful, light-hearted, good time with 'em."

"Good gracious! I don't believe poor Arturo is very likely to explode, Mr. Orbison."

"No; he's a gentle boy—patient and self-contained, I should say, no matter what he suffers. You don't understand my reference, naturally. There are things beneath the surface in Raona, Miss Ambler. It isn't as if you were playing around with American young men—or British, either. I wonder if you could attach some seriousness to the princess's anxiety for her son. Mr. Rennie does. He told me that Don Arturo was in a position here that possibly involved the element of personal peril and that your playing around, so to speak, might add to it."

"What!" Claire's eyes opened widely; she was indignant. "I think I never heard anything much more absurd in my life! Is that his mother's idea—and Mr. Rennie's—and yours? That in my playing around I play them off against each other?"

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 "No, no," he said hurriedly. "That wasn't implied—not exactly."

Not exactly'!" she exclaimed, her eyes flashing. "That means it was!"

"No. I don't imply it was in your intention; but it might result in the same effect as if it were."

"How?"

"The Bastoni might interpret themselves as in a manner competitors with Don Arturo for your favour. They might believe themselves his rivals."

"Oh!" she cried. "What utter nonsense!"

"So far as your intention is concerned, it is," Orbison said. "I don't doubt it. But Mr. Rennie has an idea that the two brothers do regard themselves somewhat in that light. And since they are young Liana's bitter enemies politically, and the passions of people here are very different from the kind you've known elsewhere, Miss Ambler"

"Good heavens!" she cried. "What on earth have I to do with all that? Do you think the Bastoni want to marry me? Both of them? They've been just ordinarily polite, in their way, like anybody else. I know they're against Don Arturo politically; even our valet de chambre talks about that, and says they're

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 determined not to let Arturo organize Fascismo here; but that's nothing I could have the slightest effect upon, even if I tried. I don't think the Bastoni have a personal feeling about Arturo, anyhow. He was hurt with me yesterday because I went to the Salone with Giuseppe, and then he came there and I soothed him down; but he looked so disapproving that the baron noticed it and spoke of it to me. I told him what was the matter and the baron didn't think anything of it; he began to talk of other things right away. If he felt anything personal he'd have shown it then, because"

"Pardon me," Orbison interrupted. "You say you 'told him what was the matter.' Do you mean you told him that young Liana had asked you not to go there with them?"

"The baron asked me if Arturo had advised me not to go to the Salone with his brother. Well, Arturo didn't want me to go there with anybody; he hates the place."

"But what did you tell the baron when he asked you that about his brother?"

"Why!—I said 'Yes,' of course."

"You did?"

"But good gracious!" Claire cried. "Why shouldn't

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Author:Ellen Lloyd Key Blunt

Works

 * "The Southern Cross", also titled "God and Liberty!"
 * "Bread"
 * "The Xmas Star for the Poor"

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 I? I've just told you it didn't make the slightest difference. We were dancing, and I doubt if he even noticed what I said. As a matter of fact, I'm positive he didn't. I'm not wholly an idiot, Mr. Orbison!" She spoke with agitation and there was a smarting threat of tears in her eyes, in spite of her. This was not at all the conversation she had expected to hold with the invalid gentleman when she had bravely left the pergola to speak to him; and she was bewildered, even chagrined. "I really am not an idiot," she said. "I'm not—even though I see you think I am!"

"No, no"

"You do!" she said huskily, her emotion increasing. "Of course you do! You think I've done harm."

He lifted a thin hand in protest. "No, no! I hope you haven't."

"Ah! That means you do think so! That's what your watching me and thinking about me, ever since you came here, amounts to! I asked you to tell me what you thought of me, and I get what I deserve for being a bold enough idiot to ask you such a question! You've looked me well over and you've decided I'm a fool!"

Distressed, for she spoke passionately, he gently

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 touched her forearm. "My dear Miss Ambler!" he said. "Don't you remember we began our talk with an apology from me for being so intrusive as to think of you at all?"

She looked at the emaciated fingers placatively just touching her arm; and suddenly the tears that had threatened filled her eyes; but she smiled upon him through them. "You didn't owe me an apology for that," she said. "I've been doing as much thinking about you as you have about me."

He looked startled. "What? No—you mustn't"

She leaned toward him a little. "I'm not the kind of fool you think I am," she said. "But there are some things nobody can help!"

Then, not permitting a second anti-climax to mar the conclusion of this interview that had begun with one, she jumped up and walked quickly back into the hotel. Emotions varied and conflicting wrung her, yet at the same time thrilled her. They were altogether genuine and far from shallow; but what actually controlled her, in spite of them, was her sense of dramatic effect. Claire's exits were always excellent.

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HE knew that her exits were excellent, even though, unlike her entrances, they had to be made on the spur of the moment. An entrance could always be planned, as she had planned hers this morning. She might have written it for herself: "Enter heroine with red book of poems in her hand, and sings aria, Rupert listening."

In her room, still blushing and with eyes still wet, she sat down to wonder breathlessly how much Orbison would think she had implied by her final words to him; but even in this she was nevertheless conscious of her duality as both an emotional person and a stage director. It was a consciousness that annoyed her; and sometimes, when it became acute, as it did this morning, it almost dismayed her. All her life—even when she was a child—she had seemed to be not one person but two. One was an honest person and the other appeared to be an artist. The honest person did the feeling and most of the thinking; but the artist directed her behaviour and cared about

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 nothing except picturesque effects. When Claire was nineteen and her father died, she had been truly grief-stricken; but the artist was present at his funeral; and she sometimes remembered with amazement that it was the artist who made her bow her head at the cemetery. This was a recollection she always hurried out of her thoughts, lest the amazement become shame.

"Heaven, please tell me," she said now, in her cell bedroom in Raona. "What's the matter with me? What am I? Can't I ever in my whole life do anything natural?"

For it seemed to her that she was in love with the broken Englishman. "Something about him," as she thought, had roused a depth of feeling she had not known before; his worn, fine face, retaining the haggard outlines of what had been a conspicuous manly beauty, was always before her, whether her actual eyes beheld it or not; the thought of him haunted her with pain and a strange joy; and she wanted him to know it. There had been days when Orbison, lying pallid in his chair in the garden, seemed almost to be dying; and she had wished to go to his side and kneel and say, "Let me die with you, dear." But even that was the picturesque impulse; she knew she would

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 have knelt gracefully, and that even with the man she loved she could not evade her damnable artist's stage directions.

"I'm terrible!" she moaned to herself; and looked in the mirror. "But maybe it's because of that."

She meant her extraordinary prettiness. Perhaps her duality was caused by her comeliness—girls born to be pretty might be doomed for that very reason, to behave picturesquely. "Ah! If he knew me as I really am," she thought, "he wouldn't care for me; he'd be horrified instead." Then she had a brightening idea. "Probably every other good-looking girl in the world has these same two natures." And now she smiled to the glass. "Except the stupid ones!"

She was not really despondent; she was excited, and happily so. Moreover, in her thought, "If he knew me as I really am he wouldn't care for me," there was a significant assumption, although she did not pause to make it more definite. Nevertheless, it was therein contained: "Not knowing me, he does care for me!"

Yet she had said to him: "You've looked me well over and you've decided I'm a fool!" She had wept when he touched her with his hand, so pitiably thin; but the tears that filled her eyes then were already in

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 them, because he had insisted upon talking reproachfully to her about Arturo Liana and those foolish Bastoni. That did not distress her now; she had let the Bastoni play around because they were funny and danced well, as she explained; and she was sorry if that had distressed Arturo, but there was no harm in it, she was sure; and since Orbison seemed to wish it, she would snub the Bastoni and be so nice to Arturo that he'd forget. She did not really believe the Englishman thought her a fool because he compared her to a fairy child playing with explosives; and her strong impression was that a girl's picturesqueness suffers no damage by a gentleman's persuading himself that other gentlemen are becoming explosive on her account.

Her eyes, still upon the mirror, grew large and bright with a stirred appreciation: the image before her was of a personage, that wonderful lady who had given him, he said, the final loveliness of the hour of greatest beauty he had known in all his life. Claire had resolved never to tell him that she was the lady, and she was determined to maintain her resolution. Her only problem, therefore, was to think of the best way of letting him find it out for himself.

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 She had not thought of any way at all when she and her mother went into the refectory for lunch; but she had the pleasure of seeing that his colour heightened—as she was aware her own did—when she nodded to him. Miss Orbison joined him in returning her salutation; Claire murmured her mother's name to them; and, when the meal was finished, the four people walked together out into the garden and together drank their coffee at a table placed beside Orbison's long chair. Mrs. Ambler noticed that it was a relief to him to get back to this chair.

"I should think you'd have luncheon brought to you here outdoors," she said. "The chairs in the refectory are so uncomfortably stiff."

He shook his head and smiled. "No. One clings to ordinary habits, doing what other people do as long as one can. Besides, this really isn't a proper place to eat—not from a porcelain plate, at least; I'm afraid they'd not understand if I asked for vine leaves. Do you know the whole story of Raona, Miss Ambler? Do you know the beginning of it?"

"No," she said, looking at him with a full straight gaze, not lacking in a mysterious gravity. "I don't even know the end of it, Mr. Orbison."

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 At that, his glance swept away from her quickly, and he pointed down the coast to their left. "The first Greeks landed just there," he said; and he told her of the storm that had driven the mariners back down the strait and forced this landing. She hung upon his story, never looking away from him, while Mrs. Ambler and Miss Orbison produced embroideries and plied their needles, listening, too, in the dreamy manner of sewing ladies. He talked of antique peoples as if they were human and comprehensible, not dried data of a dried historian; and, having one so intently gazing a listener as never before inspired him, he told her of the Greek fighting down the coast, of the coming of the war fleets of Alcibiades, sweeping the sea before them, of the perishing of that navy and of the strange death of Archimedes, and of Plato's sailing back to Athens after his wicked last repartee to the tyrant Dionysius.

"How lovely!" Claire cried at this, and she clasped her hands together, delighted with the ancient witticism. "I always thought Plato must be about the same as the square of the hypotenuse, or metempsychosis—until this afternoon. I'd never have believed there was anybody in the world who could make me wish I'd known him, Mr. Orbison!"

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 Miss Orbison looked at her watch. "Dear me! It's almost tea-time already. Charles, you do have a silver tongue!"

"I think you mean it's metal because it can be used so long without wearing out," he said; and glancing over his shoulder, he shook his head. "There's a gentleman I fear thinks it must be of iron; I hadn't noticed him. He has the air of a long-suffering poet, waiting a chance to speak to Miss Ambler."

The gentleman was Arturo Liana. He stood by the precipice railing, fiddling pensively with his straw hat and a walking stick, too patiently courteous to interrupt by a closer approach. Claire was not pleased to remember that she had determined to be nice to him; for now, at last, the man at her side had become infinitely more to her than the man at a distance. She gave the invalid a softly reproachful glance eloquent of her meaning: "All right," she said to him, entirely in this ocular demonstration. "I'll obey you and be an angel to him; but it's foolish and drags me miserably away from you."

What she said with her voice was less pathetic, though she sighed as she rose. "I suppose so. Probably wants me to take a walk. Oh, very well!"

She gave the man in the chair another look, one

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 that meant, "You're doing this!" Then she turned away, and, rearranging her expression to a more welcoming aspect, walked briskly toward Arturo. She did not reach him, however, without being intercepted.

Giuseppe Bastoni rose from the bench where he had been sitting beyond a clustering shrubbery, and stepped forth to stand bowing before her.

"Miss Ambler—you please?"

She stopped. "Yes?"

"I please like to invite you. You will come to dance? Music at Salone nice good zis assternoon. You please enjoy to come?"

"No," she said; and she intended the coldness with which she spoke and looked at him to be observed by the person whose suggestion she thought she was obeying. "No, I believe not."

Giuseppe stared through his monocle. "No? You don't like?"

"Not to-day."

"No? You don't like to come because we go to Naple' sometime, my brozzer an' me?"

"I haven't any idea what you mean," she said. "I must go on; I'm keeping Mr. Liana waiting."

"Oh, yes! Meester Liana!" Giuseppe stood aside,

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 and bowed deeply. "You don' like keep Meester Liana to wait. Oh, no! Excuse!"

He turned at once and strode out of the garden, while Claire, continuing upon her way to Arturo, glanced brightly back over her shoulder at the man in the long chair.

"You see?" she seemed to ask. "Are you satisfied with me?"

But he did not appear to be satisfied; and she was puzzled. "Good gracious!" she thought. "Isn't there any pleasing you at all?"

Apparently there wasn't, for he frowned heavily; and the unfortunate Arturo paid for it. She was anything but angelic to him during their walk.

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RTURO complained of this gently as they stood in the cloister for a few moments at parting, upon their return. Twilight had fallen, the air was still; the only sound they heard, except a gurgle of water in the pink marble fountain, was a lonely melody played upon a reed pipe far away and high above them, on a cliffside rising behind the narrow town. It was the Pastorale; and Arturo's sigh was as wistful as the tune.

"You were so kind last night," he said. "It was heaven for me, even before you sang. To-day you drop me over the precipice again. I never can know what I do to displease you."

"Nothing at all, Arturo."

"Then why do you treat me so?"

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "It seems to me I treat you pretty well. You saw how I snubbed that poor little Giuseppe Bastoni, merely because you were waiting to speak to me. I thought he made it pretty plain that he was offended, and of course

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16 STRUCTURE AND GROWTH that the intermediate substance of the cell-cavities is not a simple structure, but one composed of the walls peculiar to the contiguous cells: that is to say, each cell is surrounded with a thick ring, its peculiar wall, the external outline of which is more or less distinct. In the preparation from which the delineation is taken, it was in some parts quite as distinct as the internal. Between two cells these external outlines blend into one line, but separate again when the contact of the cell-walls ceases; there is thus often left between the cell-walls a three or four-cornered intermediate space (c), filled with a kind of intercellular substance. No other structure, no deposition of strata, or distinction between primary cell-membrane and secondary deposit can be observed in the thickened cell-walls. The cell-contents also remain clear after the thickening of the walls. At the base of the branchial ray, it is scarcely possible to distinguish between the different cells-walls, and the cartilage presents the appearance of a homogeneous substance, in which separate small cavities only are seen. (Pl. I, fig. 7.) Around some few only of the cell-cavities, a trace of the peculiar cell-walls may be seen in the form of a ring. This ring is usually somewhat thin, so that the entire intermediate substance of the cell-cavities cannot be formed of the cell-walls; but the intercellular substance, which was so small in quantity in the centre of the branchial ray, here contributes essentially to the formation of the cartilaginous substance, and often completely prevents the immediate contact of the cell-walls. This intercellular substance appears, however, to be homogeneous with that of the cell-walls, and in most situations coalesces with them. The cell-cavities, which are here transparent and without granulous contents, are now the cartilage-corpuscles.

The process of formation of this cartilage is as follows. It consists originally of cells, which lie in very close contact, but every one of which has its special, very thin cell-membrane. This follows, firstly, from the complete accordance in appearance, of cartilage in its earliest stage, with vegetable cellular tissue; secondly, from the presence of the nucleus in the young cells of cartilage, a structure which, as will subsequently be seen, occurs in almost all the cells proved to exist in other tissues ; thirdly, from the fact, that a separation of the cell-walls is often distinctly perceptible in instances where they are


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 that's the end of me for both him and his brother. Well, I did that for you, didn't I?"

"But if you did, you seem to resent that you did it," Arturo said. "You have found some fault with everything I have said. If I say, 'It is fine weather,' you say, 'It is bad weather'! When I ask why you believe so, you begin to whistle and you whistle for half an hour!"

"Then don't ask me why I believe it's bad weather. That's simple, isn't it?"

"Ah!" he said. "The sun could be so bright if you would let it! Why can't I please you a little?"

Claire looked at him seriously. "You do."

"I can't think so to-day. Yesterday I could. It is an eternal up-and-down!"

"No," she said. "I like you as well to-day as I did yesterday. I'm always pleased with you, Arturo."

"Is that all?" he asked. "Just 'pleased'? Just you 'like'?"

"Oh, dear!" she said, and she shook her head despairingly. "There it is! Whenever I give you the chance, you say things like that! Don't you see that I spend half my time with you trying to keep you from asking such questions?"

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 "Yes, I do," he answered. "I am afraid it is what you have wish'."

"What is?"

Arturo looked at her steadily, with dark, sad eyes. "Yes, I think it is true. You have wish' that I should want to ask such questions but that I should not ask them. I think you like men to be in love with you but not to trouble you by telling you. Isn't it true?"

"What!" she cried; but even in her own ears the indignation she put into her voice had a sound somewhat enfeebled. Confronted with so simple yet exact a statement of fact, she was at a loss; and, indeed, she felt both helpless and foolish. She could find nothing better to do than to employ a stencil that she herself knew was too worn with coquettes' usage to be an adequate defence. "I never heard anything so unjust in all my life!"

"Then you do wish me to tell you?"

"To tell me what?" she said impatiently; but in the same instant she understood her mistake and that he would reply, "I love you!" She stepped back from him quickly, her hands fluttering in hasty gestures of negation. "No! I don't mean that; I don't mean to ask you such a question. Arturo, please"

"Then what I said of you is true."

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 "Oh, dear me!" And with that, she uttered some little incoherent sounds of petulant distress; then fell back upon another and even more useless stencil: "Arturo, don't you understand?"

"I am afraid so," he said quietly; but there was something in his voice that made her catch her breath. "You needn't be disturbed. I will not say what you fear I would say. I will never say it."

"Arturo"

"That is all," he said.

Then they stood facing each other, not speaking. Her stencils had not aided her; she knew herself accused but defenseless before the accusation; and helplessly, in her confusion, she found nothing at all to say. She had a sensation as of becoming smaller; and Arturo as he stood before her, slender but vague in the twilight, with tragedy in his dark and gentle eyes, was like a tall judge of her.

The white columns of the cloister and the outlines of the marble fountain, in the wan light, were to remain in her memory as a background like the architectural shapings of a shadowy judgment seat where she had been unable to clear herself of a true charge. But Arturo was an unreproachful judge. Orbison had spoken of him as Hamlet; and just such a sorrowful

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 dignity invested the young Italian in this parting with the American girl; for a parting it was—a final one. Foreseeing Providence has been kind in not making us, also, foreseeing; and so we do not know what is to remain most keenly in our memories. Claire's thoughts were more annoying than acutely painful and were principally occupied with herself; she no more knew that for years afterward she was unavailingly to remember Arturo Liana as he stood looking at her now in the gray cloister than she knew that this was the last time she would ever see him.

He bowed to her gravely, and left her. "Oh, well" she murmured; and she sighed a deep sigh, in which naturally a little anger mingled with other emotions; for she could not be put at a disadvantage and remain wholly unresentful. "Well, it's what I get!" she thought, meaning that she had been punished for obeying a too virtuous gentleman's suggestions. Then, going into the long corridor in the interior of the hotel, she discovered this gentleman seated alone at a small tea table where he was lingering with some cold cups and saucers and the end of a cigarette.

She immediately placed herself in a chair opposite

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 him at the table. "Well, what was the matter?" she asked.

"When, Miss Ambler?"

"When I did what you'd told me I ought to do."

"My dear young lady!" he objected. "I have too many culpabilities of my own; I don't tell people what they ought to do."

"You told me," she said sharply. "Certainly you did. And I do wish you wouldn't call me a 'dear young lady,' Mr. Orbison. You're not my uncle; you're not old enough."

"I'm afraid I am," he said, smiling. "At least I'm afraid I feel so."

"No, you don't," she returned quickly. "You haven't been watching me like an uncle—not a bit—and I haven't been like a niece being watched!"

"I beg your pardon," he said with some awkwardness, and returned to her opening question. "What was the matter when?"

"I think you're evading. You know perfectly you did tell me what you thought I ought to do—what you and Mr. Rennie and Arturo Liana's mother thought I ought to do. You told me this morning and infuriated me. You said that if I had any decency I'd be nice to Arturo and drop the baron and Giuseppe."

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 "No, I"

"Yes, you did, absolutely. So I've done it. You saw me freeze Giuseppe Bastoni when I left you this afternoon to join Arturo. You were looking—I saw you were; and I snubbed Giuseppe the worst I know how. He knew I meant it, and he and his brother will understand perfectly that it's permanent. I think he was in a cold rage when I went by him. Then I looked back to see if I had done what I meant to, which was just to please you, and I saw I hadn't. You looked like the siroc! Does it make you bitter to have a girl try to please you?"

He did not reply at once; and she took a cigarette from a silver case lying open before him on the table, and lighted it herself, as he seemed unaware. "Well, does it? What was wrong with what I did?"

"I'll tell you," he said thoughtfully. "I didn't propose a line of conduct for you this morning. You said I'd been watching you and asked me what I saw. Among other things, I said I hadn't been able to understand how any girl could give such fellows as the Bastoni any ground for conceiving, however mistakenly, that they were perhaps rivals with so splendid a young man as Arturo Liana. But whatever harm there was in it had been done; I didn't suggest an

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 attempt to undo it by making those two wolfish creatures more poisonously young Liana's enemies than ever."

"What?" she cried.

"Why, yes," he said calmly. "That was what you must have accomplished. Don't you see it?"

She looked at him almost fiercely. "I did exactly what you as much as told me to. You've just admitted you reproached me with giving the Bastoni a chance to think they were Arturo's rivals. Well, I snubbed Giuseppe, practically in Arturo's presence. Now you attack me for making him his enemy instead of his rival. No, I don't see it!"

"I'll try to make it clearer, Miss Ambler. The truth is, the Bastoni have the reputation of being pretty bad hats. You naturally wouldn't have known that; but there's no doubt of it; and there are quite a number of other bad hats in the place they come from and the villages between Raona and there. You know most of the landowners don't go to their own estates unless they're heavily armed and guarded by the carabinieri; it isn't altogether a safe neighbourhood except for foreigners like us—they let us alone because we increase the revenue. Well, the Bastoni know what their own reputation is; and that they're

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 fairly notorious among the Italians for selling spurious antique jewellery to foreigners and as associates of the other bad hats—and young Liana is an Italian. Don't you see what conclusion this Giuseppe would come to in his mind? You'd formerly been most gracious to him and his brother. Then abruptly, with Liana present, you snub him and go to Liana. Of course he'd think Liana had been saying things about him to you and ruined him with you. That's why I seemed disturbed when you looked back at me. Don't you understand, Miss Ambler?"

Claire's head drooped and so did her eyelids; she slowly crushed her cigarette down into an ash tray upon the table. "You do think I'm a fool," she said in a low voice. "It seems a little unjust when I did only what I thought you wanted me to do. I didn't want to do it. Do you think I wanted to go away from you and walk with Arturo? I suppose you'll tell me now that you didn't suggest my being nice to him, either!"

"No," Orbison said. "I didn't."

She looked up slowly. "No?"

"I didn't suggest your doing anything at all," he insisted. "Certainly not that you be 'nice' to a young man obviously suffering on your account—not unless

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 you meant to accept him. Naturally, if you didn't mean to do that, your being 'nice' to him would only increase his torture."

"Well, then," she said, smiling suddenly. "I've pleased you about that, at least. I was the very devil to him! When we got back from our walk just now we had rather a scene; he virtually denounced me as a trifler. Then he stalked off, and I don't know when he'll be back. That is to say, my being 'nice' to him because you suggested it merely made us both wretched and on that account I'm sure you're pleased with me at last, Mr. Orbison!"

"Pleased with you at last!" he repeated in a tone ironically rueful; and he laughed. "Much you bother yourself whether I'm pleased with you or not!"

"No," she returned. "That won't do." She put her forearms on the table and leaned toward him, keeping her gaze gravely and unwaveringly upon his. "I'm serious; it won't do. You know how much I care to please you and I know you know it."

"I don't," he protested; and as his pallid cheeks once more showed colour in response to words of hers, pain came into his eyes, and he had the look of a man who struggles, but struggles feebly, through lack of strength. "I don't know anything of the kind.

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 It's nonsense, and you mustn't" He contrived to utter another laugh. "You are an astonishing young woman, I must say! Is your conception of ethics based solely upon the pleasing of the nearest available man?"

"Go on," she said, not moving, nor letting her eyes fall from his. The nearest available man,' you say. Very well—insult me all you please! We both know that pleasing you is all I care about; but something you don't know is that I've already pleased you more than anyone else ever did. I know it, though; and do you think that while I have that in my mind I'll ever give up going on trying to please you? Do you?"

He seemed to struggle with an increasing pain. "Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do," she said, and her eyes grew brighter; her voice was tremulous but happy. "We both know."

"Indeed I—I" Stammering, he made an effort to rise from his chair; but he had no strength, and, in difficulties with the table, could not at once get upon his feet. His sister, coming into the corridor at that moment, ran to help him.

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 "Charles!" she cried. "You might have fallen! Why didn't you ask Miss Ambler to help you?"

Claire answered her, but kept her eyes upon the flushed and panting invalid. "He knew I wouldn't," she said. "Not to help him get away!" And at that the stout and hearty Miss Orbison, after a sharper glance at both of them, looked seriously disturbed.

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LAIRE was to see this troubled look upon the ruddy face of the English spinster repeated frequently. "What's the matter with that woman?" the girl asked her mother one day in their small salon. "She looked so reliable and solid when they first came here—not that she looked happy, of course, if you caught her off her guard when her brother wasn't looking—but anyhow she hadn't that fretting expression you see about her eyes and mouth so much lately. It can't be because Mr. Orbison's health is worse, because it isn't; he's just the same."

Mrs. Ambler sighed. "I shouldn't think one would need to seek far for the reason a sister would look troubled with a brother in that shattered condition—especially when the brother's as lovely a man as hers is. I've discovered that since we've begun to see so much of them. He is lovely."

"Yes," Claire said absently. "But I meant something different—that expression she's got just lately."

"I haven't noticed it."

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 "Perhaps she only has it when she looks at me. Mother, you don't think"

"I don't think what?"

Claire had paused, gazing out of the window dreamily; and her mother repeated the question.

"What is it I don't think?"

"You don't think that sometimes—they avoid us?"

"Good gracious!" Mrs. Ambler exclaimed, highly amused. "They don't get much chance! You've taken pretty good care of that, I must say! We go to the refectory when they do; we come out to the corridor when they do; we go out to the garden with them; we're everywhere that they are, at the same hour and in the same place. If we were a house party of four we couldn't well see more of them, and so how could they avoid us, even if they did want to, poor things!"

"Yes; but that's the point: Do you think they want to?"

"I haven't seen any sign of it. They're always cordial and he's always interesting. Where'd you get the idea?"

Claire shook her head. "I don't know, unless it's that troubled expression she has when she looks at me. Once or twice I've thought she wanted to speak

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