unt Grizel, and have had enough. I chose Africa,
because it sounds so nice and racy in novels, doesn't it? Fortunately
papa's greatest friend, a parson and also an archaeologist, has a
daughter out there. She paints, and lives on a farm somewhere on the
veld in the Cape Colony, so I am allowed to go and stay with her for
three months.

"I even escaped the company of my maid, as you saw, though she tried hard
to persuade papa that I should get into trouble without her. I believe
she would have come at the last, even without luggage, if I hadn't been
too smart for her and had the door locked. Lucky, wasn't it? We should
never have been able to execute our little scheme with her about. Now
tell me your story."

"No need to go too closely into that," said April. "No one will put you
any piercing questions about my family, or be in a position to contradict
your statements."

The Poole family tree, in fact, grew as tall and old as the Roscannon's
upon the pages of heraldry, but drink and riotous living had perished its
roots and rotted its branches long before April was born. Her father,
its last hope, had been a scamp and gamester who broke his wife's heart
and bequeathed the cup of poverty and despair to his child's lips. But
these were things locked in April's heart, and not for idle telling in a
railway carriage.

"I am an orphan without relatives or friends," she went on quietly. "No
assets except musical tastes and a knowledge of languages, picked up in
cheap Continental schools. I am twenty, and rather embittered by life,
but I try not to be, because there's nothing can blacken the face of the
sun like bitterness of heart, is there? It can spoil even a spring day."

Diana looked vague. In spite of tilts and tournaments with the Grizzly
Bear, she had no more knowledge of that affliction of bitterness to which
April referred than of the bitterness of affliction. The fact was patent
in the gay light of her sherry-brown eye and her red mouth, so avid for
pleasure. The book of life's difficulties, well conned by April Poole,
was still closed to the Earl's only daughter.

"Perhaps she will know a little more about it by the end of the voyage,"
thought April, but without a tinge of malice, for in truth she was
neither malicious nor bitter, though she often pretended to herself to be
both. Whatever life had done to her, it had not yet robbed her of her
powers of resilience, nor quenched her belief in the