is place is a
poem! I don't wonder that the colonel is fighting Berserk to save it
alive. And Mr. Pelham and his millionaires come calmly up to the counter
and offer to buy it--with mere money!"

He filled the porcelain bath with a crystal-clear flood that, measured
by its icy temperature, might have been newly distilled glacier drip;
and the cold plunge did something toward establishing the reality of
things. But the incredibilities promptly reasserted themselves when he
went down a little in advance of the house-party guests, and met Elsa,
and was presented to a low-voiced lady with silvery hair and the face of
a chastened saint, named to him as Miss Cauffrey, but addressed by Elsa
as "Aunt June."

"I hope you find yourself somewhat refreshed, Mr. Ballard," said the
sweet-voiced chatelaine. "Elsa tells me you have been in the tropics,
and our high altitudes must be almost distressing at first; I know I
found them so."

"Really, I hadn't noticed the change," returned Ballard rather vaguely.
Then he bestirred himself, and tried to live up to the singularly
out-of-place social requirements. "I'm not altogether new to the
altitudes, though I haven't been in the West for the past year or two.
For that matter, I can't quite realise that I am in the West at this
moment--at least in the uncitied part."

Miss Cauffrey smiled, and the king's daughter laughed softly.

"It does me so much good!" she declared, mocking him. "All through that
dining-car dinner on the 'Overland Flyer' you were trying to reconcile
me with the Western barbarities. Didn't you say something about being
hopeful because I was aware of the existence of an America west of the
Alleghanies?"

"Please let me down as easily as you can," pleaded the engineer. "You
must remember that I am only a plain workingman."

"You are come to take poor Mr. Macpherson's place?" queried Miss
Cauffrey; which was Ballard's first intimation that the Arcadian
promotion scheme was not taboo by the entire house-hold of Castle
'Cadia.

"That is what I supposed I was doing, up to this evening. But it seems
that I have stumbled into fairyland instead."

"No," said the house-daughter, laughing at him again--"only into the
least Arcadian part of Arcadia. And after dinner you will be free to go
where you are impatient to be at this very moment."

"I don't know about that," was Ballard's rejoinder. "I was just now
wondering if I could be heroic enough to go contentedly from al