is at Venice that the trouble with Balderstone is to come, and that
Osborne topples him over into the Grand Canal, and rescues you from
his baleful influence."

"Humph!" said Marguerite, with a scornful shrug of her shoulders.
"Robert Osborne! A likely sort of person to rescue me from anything!
He wouldn't have nerve enough to rescue me from a grasshopper if he
were armed to the teeth. Furthermore, I shall not go to Venice in
August. It's bad enough in April--damp and hot--the home of malaria-
-an asylum for artistic temperaments; and insecty. No, my dear aunt,
even if I overlook everything else to please Mr. Harley, he'll have
to modify the Venetian part of that story, for I am determined that
no pen of his shall force me into Italy at this season. I wouldn't
go there to please Shakespeare, much less Stuart Harley. Let the
affair come off at Interlaken, if it is to come off at all, which I
doubt."

"There is no Grand Canal at Interlaken," said Mrs. Corwin, sagely;
for she had been an omnivorous reader of Baedeker since she had
learned the part she was to play in Harley's book, and was therefore
well up in geography.

"No; but there's the Jungfrau. Osborne can push Balderstone down the
side of an Alp and kill him," returned Miss Andrews, viciously.

"Why, Marguerite! How can you talk so? Mr. Harley doesn't wish to
have Balderstone killed," cried Mrs. Corwin, aghast. "If Osborne
killed Balderstone he'd be a murderer, and they'd execute him."

"Which is exactly what I want," said Miss Andrews, firmly. "If he