kyline of New York sink slowly
behind the horizon until I reached Naples I had at least been a free
agent. But hardly had I signed my guest card at Parker's Hotel and
strolled out to hail a crazy Neapolitan hack when the angular and
purposeful figure of my Aunt Sarah loomed up in the near foreground
and--saving her grace--eclipsed the picturesqueness of the town and the
distant cone of Vesuvius. I had known vaguely that this estimable lady
was beating her way about Europe, guide-booked and grimly set upon
self-improvement, but I had hoped to keep the area of two or three
monarchies between us.

I knew that from one to the other of the Cook's Agencies she would be
flitting with the same frantic energy that characterizes the industry of
the ant. That I should myself pass within hailing distance of her party
or be recruited in her peregrinations was a disaster which I had not
anticipated. None the less the blow had fallen and I had walked unwarned
into the ambuscade of her fond embrace. Aunt Sarah would now converse
voluminously of cathedrals and old masters, and all the things upon
which tourists are fed to a point of acute mental dyspepsia.

She had ordered me to luncheon with much the same finality as that with
which royalty commands the attendance of guests at court. I had gone
meekly though doing so involved passing Merola's and opened up a series
of events which were destined to alter for the worse my immediate
future. But the luncheon had been only the beginning, and greater
misfortunes were to follow in due order.

I have never since been able to understand precisely what form of
paresis seized upon me, and paralyzed my normally efficient power of
lying, when she instructed me to attach myself to her party for a motor
trip to Villefranche and Nice. I do know that no available mendacity
occurred to my shocked brain and I found myself murmuring an acceptance.
The acceptance was again meek and spineless. I had discovered at
luncheon that Aunt Sarah, with that motherly obsession which appears to
characterize many maiden ladies of fifty and beyond, had under wing a
party of three young ladies who were capping off their educations with
the post graduate "advantages" of the grand tour. That these young
ladies possessed all the homely virtues, I have not the slightest doubt.
Their faces and figures attested the homeliness and their virtue was
such that they seemed always wondering whether their halos were on
straight. T