moment when that British officer at Gibraltar held up those papers,
neatly folded and sealed and bound with bright, inappropriately cheerful
red tape, and with an icy eye demanded an explanation beyond human power
to afford.

All this would have been spared me. But, on the other hand, I could not
now look back to that dinner on the Turin-Paris _rapide_. I should never
have seen that little, ruined French village, with guns booming in the
distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and
over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would
now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should
never have met the most beautiful--Well, all clouds have silver linings;
some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped
at the St. Ives; not in the least!

At any rate, there I was at eight o'clock of a Wednesday evening in a
restaurant full of the usual lights and buzz and glitter, among women
in soft-hued gowns, and men in their hideous substitute for the
same. Across the table sat my one-time guardian, dear old Peter
Dunstan,--Dunny to me since the night when I first came to him, a very
tearful, lonesome, small boy whose loneliness went away forever with his
welcoming hug,--just arrived from home in Washington to eat a farewell
dinner with me and to impress upon me for the hundredth time that I had
better not go.

"It's a wild-goose chase," he snapped, attacking his entree savagely.
Heaven knows it was to prove so, even wilder than his dreams could
paint; but if there were geese in it, myself included, there was also to
be a swan.