s they offered
fields of quieting exploration. Now, for a time, I skipped about,
reading here and there passages in no way connected. There was a highly
humorous description of a certain Frenchman who had insistently shadowed
the course of the girl's travels about the Continent, inflicting on her
an homage which it seemed to me must have been more offensive than
actual rudeness. She did not give his name, but her description of his
appearance and eccentricities was so droll and keenly appreciative that
even my strained lips curled into a grin of enjoyment in the perusal. He
had a coronet to bestow and she likened his attitude and bearing to that
of a crested cock robin. "To-night," she wrote, "_monsieur le comte_
proposed for my hand--to Mother. I was in the next room and heard it. To
hear one's self proposed to by proxy is quite the most amusing thing
that can happen. When he asks me I shall inform him that I've already
given my heart to another man--a man who hasn't asked me and may never
ask me. Yes, he will, too. He _must_. It is in my horoscope. 'The
Heavens rolled between us at the end, we shall but vow the faster for
the stars.' This little Frenchman needs an heiress and it might as well
be me--but it won't be."

This was the first intimation that the unknown author of these pages was
possessed of wealth as well as beauty. In a vague way I found myself
regretting the discovery, although I could not say why. Through these
pages breathed the distinction of a piquant and subtly charming
personality--the fact that she had fortune as well, could add nothing.
But as I read the paragraphs devoted to her odyssey across the continent
and around the borders of the Mediterranean, shadowed always by this
persistent suitor with his picayune title, it struck me that her
itinerary and the order of her going tallied with my own wanderings. Yet
that might have no significance, since the routes of European touring
are distressingly devoid of variation.

The finger of destiny had seemed to concern itself in the fashion in
which I had always just missed the lady of Naples, Monte Carlo and Cairo
by a margin of seconds and of untoward circumstance. If my Fate were
playing with me in this manner it appeared consistent with its policy of
tantalizing evasiveness that she and the writer might be the same. When
I had given up the pursuit and come away to this remote quarter of the
globe it might still be decreed that I should not escape h