"No, please don't. Of course, you are an American?"

"Yes; but you need not mind that."

"What do you mean?" she asked, looking at him frankly.

"I take it," he answered, with a twinkle in his grave eyes, which
she saw, and liked him for, "that you want some one to listen to
your impressions of--all this. It IS rum, is it not?"

She laughed. "Yes," she admitted, "it is--RUM."

In a few minutes they had found a seat beneath a marvellous stand of
flowers, and she was chattering away like a schoolgirl while he
listened, and added here and there a keen comment or a humorous
suggestion.

Presently she began talking of herself, and in natural sequence of
her husband, of their home in England, of his career, and her hatred
of politics.

"And," she said suddenly, at the end of it, "here IS my husband."

Harkness followed the direction of her glance, and looked upon a man
in English Court-dress coming towards them.

"Ah!" he said, in a peculiar, dull voice, "that is your husband?"

She was smiling upon the man who approached, beckoning to him to
come with her eyes, as women sometimes do. She turned sharply upon