ill not be amused. You will be married."

He pulled out a chair for her. "Will your friends stay while I tell you
the rest?"

"No, they are children; they want to buy peanuts and pop-corn--they want
to play."

The others laughed. But the fat Armenian did not laugh. "Your soul is
old!"

"You see," she asked the others, "what I mean? He says things like that
to me. He told me once that in a former incarnation I had walked beside
the Nile and had loved a king."

"A king-poet," the man corrected.

"Will you tell mine?" Eve asked suddenly.

"Certainly, madam."

"I am mademoiselle. You go first, Marie-Louise."

But Marie-Louise insisted on yielding to her. "We will come back for
you."

Coming back, they found Eve in an irritable temper. "He told
me--nothing."

"I told you what you did not want to hear. But I told you the truth."

"I don't believe in such things." Eve was lofty. Her cold eyes challenged
the Oriental. "I don't believe you know anything about it."

"If Mademoiselle will write it down----" He was fat and puffy, but he had
a sort of large dignity which ignored her rudeness. "If Mademoiselle will
write it down, she will not say--next year--'I do not believe.'"

She shivered. "I wish I hadn't come. Dicky boy, let's go and play. Pip
and Marie-Louise can stay if they like it. I don't."

When Marie-Louise had had her imagination once more fed on poets, kings,
and previous incarnations, she and Pip went forth to seek the others.

"I wonder what he told Eve?" Pip speculated.

Marie-Louise spoke with shrewdness. "He probably told her that she would
marry you--only he wouldn't put it that way. He would say that in
reaching for a star she would stumble on a diamond."

"And is Brooks the star?"

She nodded, grinning. "And you are the diamond. It is what she
wants--diamonds."

"She wants more than that"--tenderness crept into his voice--"she wants
love--and I can give it."

"She wants Dr. Brooks. 'Most any woman would," said Marie-Louise cruelly.
"We all know he is different. You know it, and I know it, and Eve knows
it. He is bigger in some ways, and better!"

They found Eve and Richard in a pavilion dancing in strange company, to
raucous music. Later the four of them rode on a merry-go-round, with
Marie-Louise on a dolphin and Eve on a swan, with the two men mounted on
twin dragons. They ate chowder and broiled lobster in a restaurant high
in a fantastic tower. They swept up painted Alpine slope