nde like herself, wild cats could not
have torn such a compliment from Diana Vernilands.

"Couldn't I? Good looks without the surroundings and clothes to put them
in are not much of a gift. Beauty in a third-class carriage and shabby
clothes looks cheap and is fair game for any one's stalking."

"Well, change with me, then," urged Diana. "I'd rather be stalked than
gazed at from afar like a brazen image."

She gave her hat another stab. April quivered all over, like a mother
who sees a child ill-treated.

"Don't do that," she cried at last, in a poignant voice. She had seen
that hat in her dreams for years, but never got so near it before. Diana
Vernilands looked at her thoughtfully, then held it out.

"Put it on," she entreated. "Wear it, and be surrounded instead of me.
Oh, for Heaven's sake do! I see you are just as keen as I am, and just
as sick of being who you are. Try it on."

She may have meant the hat, or she may have meant the plan. April
accepted the hat, and with it the plan. From the moment she saw herself
in the glass her doom was dight. There was a little star-like purple
flower, such as never grew on land or sea, nestling in the golden
darkness of the fur. It seemed to April a flower that might have been
plucked from the slopes of the blue hills of Nirvana, or found floating
on the still waters of Lethe in that land where it is always afternoon.
It brought dreams of romance to her heart, and made starry flowers of its
own colour blossom in her eyes. She crushed the hat softly down upon her
dark, winging hair, crinking and shaping it to frame her face at the
right angle. Her fate was sealed.

"All right," she said, in a slow, dreamy voice. "Let's arrange it."

So while the train swooped on its way to the port whence the great ships
turn their noses towards the Southern Cross, they drew up the plot, and
the roles were cast. Diana Vernilands, for the duration of the voyage
only, was to be the penniless, friendless English girl, who could go her
ways freely and talk and mix with any one she liked without being watched
and criticized. April Poole, in the lovely hats and gowns and jewels of
Lady Diana, would accept the dignity and social obligations that hedge a
peer's daughter, even on a voyage to South Africa. On arrival at the
Cape, each to assume her identity and disappear from the ken of their
fellow-travellers: April to be swallowed up by a Cape suburb, where she
was engaged to