himself beside the beast on which Gladys was
enthroned, while Doctor and Mrs. Todd had less conspicuous positions to
the left and rear. Studying the judge, I laughed at my twinge of
jealousy, for knowing him I could not doubt that Doctor and Mrs. Todd
kept always to the left and rear, which was but right considering the
generosity with which he treated them; but he looked so little the
dashing Bedouin in his great derby and his frock-coat, so hot and
uncomfortable that even the burning sands, the pyramids, and the
curious beast which he straddled could not make of him a romantic
figure.

Young Tom Marshall, who honored Miss Minion's with his presence,
studying the photograph on my bureau one evening, asked me who was "the
beauty with the pugree." And when I replied with pride that she was my
_fiancee_ he slapped my back in congratulation.

"And Julius Caesar," he went on--"Caesar visiting his African dominions
is, I suppose, her father, and the little fellow in the top-hat his
favorite American slave, and----"

With great dignity I explained to young Marshall the relations of the
members of this Oriental group. At his suggestion that I had best take
the first steamer for Egypt I laughed. The implication was so absurd
that I even told Gladys Todd about it in my next letter to her, for I
still sat down every Saturday night and wrote to her voluminously of
all that I had been doing. Yet I was growing conscious of a sense of
her unreality. I seemed to be corresponding with the inhabitant of
another planet, and when I looked at the girl on the camel, with the
strange pugree flowing from her hat, and the pyramids in the
background, it seemed that she could not be the same simple girl who
had painted tulips on black plaques.

Penelope Blight was a much more concrete figure. At any moment as I
walked the Avenue she might come around the corner, or step from a
brougham, or be looking at me from the windows of a brown-stone
mansion. Was it a wonder that my eyes were always alert? One morning
three lines in a newspaper convinced me at last that the girl with the
blue feathers was Penelope Blight. They announced that Rufus Blight,
the Pittsburgh steel magnate, had bought a house on Fifth Avenue and
would thereafter make New York his home. That night the city seemed
more my own home than ever before and the future to hold for me more
than the past had promised. The drawn curtains of this house might be
hiding Penelo