d the
privilege of saying 'How de do' to Miss Wynton. Will you
oblige me by telling her that one of your best and newest
friends happens to be in the same hotel as her charming
self, and that if she gets him to sparkle, he (which is I)
will help considerable with copy for 'The Firefly.' Advise
me by same post, and the rest of the situation is up to
yours faithfully,

"C. K. S."

The letter was posted, and Spencer waited five tiresome days. He
saw little or nothing of Helen save at meals. Once he met her on a
footpath that runs through a wood by the side of the lake to the
little hamlet of Isola, and he was minded to raise his hat, as he
would have done to any other woman in the hotel whom he encountered
under similar circumstances; but she deliberately looked away, and his
intended courtesy must have passed unheeded.

As he sedulously avoided any semblance of dogging her footsteps, he
could not know how she was being persecuted by de la Vere, Vavasour,
and one or two other men of like habit. That knowledge was yet to
come. Consequently he deemed her altogether too prudish, and was so
out of patience with her that he and Stampa went off for a two days'
climb by way of the Muretto Pass to Chiareggio and back to Sils-Maria
over the Fex glacier.

Footsore and tired, but thoroughly converted to the marvels of the
high Alps, he reached the Kursaal side by side with the postman who
brought the chief English mail about six o'clock each evening.

He waited with an eager crowd of residents while the hall porter
sorted the letters. There were some for him from America, and one from
London in a handwriting that was strange to him. But he had quick
eyes, and he saw that a letter addressed to Miss Helen Wynton, in the
flamboyant envelope of "The Firefly," bore the same script.

Mackenzie had risen to the occasion. He even indulged in a classical
joke. "There is something in the name of Helen that attracts," he
said. "Were it not for the lady whose face drew a thousand ships to
Ilium, we should never have heard of Paris, or Troy, or the heel of
Achilles, and all these would be greatly missed."

"And I should never have heard of Mackenzie or Maloja," thought
Spencer, sinking into a chair and looking about to learn whether or
not the girl would find her letter before he went to dress for dinner.
He was sure she knew his name. Perhaps when she read the editor's
no