elds, still tropically
blue or icy with reflected clouds.

Miss Drake paused on the knoll, and looked about her.

"This remains the same, doesn't it, for all our troubles?" she said;
then to herself, slowly, "'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.'"

Heywood made no pretense of following her look.

"'Dear Nun,'" he blurted; "no, how does it go again?--'dear child, that
walkest with me here--'"

The girl started down the slope, with the impatience of one whose mood
is frustrated. The climate had robbed her cheeks of much color, but not,
it seemed, of all.

"Your fault," said Heywood, impenitent. "Merely to show you. I could
quote, once."

"Aged Man!" She laughed, as though glad of this turn. "I like you better
in prose. Go on, please, where we left off. What did you do then?"

Heywood's smile, half earnest, half mischievous, obediently faded.

"Oh, that! Why, then, of course, I discharged Rudolph's gatekeeper, put
a trusty of my own in his place, sent out to hire a diver, and turned
all hands to hunting. 'Obviously,' as Gilly would say.--We picked up two
side-bolts in the garden, by the wall, one in the mud outside, and three
the diver got in shallow water. Total recovered, six; plus two Peng had
no time for, eight. We can ill spare four guns, though; and the affair
shows they keep a beastly close watch."

"Yes," said Miss Drake, absently; then drew a slow breath. "Peng was the
most promising pupil we had."

"He was," stated her companion, "a little, unmitigated, skipping,
orange-tawny goblin!"

She made no reply. As they footed slowly along the winding path,
Flounce, the fox-terrier, who had scouted among strange clumps of
bamboo, now rejoined them briskly, cantering with her fore-legs
delicately stiff and joyful. Miss Drake stooped to pat her, saying:--

"Poor little dog. Little Foreign Dog!" She rose with a sigh, to add
incongruously, "Oh, the things we dream beforehand, and then the things
that happen!"

"I don't know." Heywood looked at her keenly. "Sometimes they're the
same."

The jealous terrier scored her dusty paws down his white drill, from
knee to ankle, before he added:--

"You know how the Queen of Heaven won her divinity."

"Another," said the girl, "of your heathen stories?"

"Rather a pretty one," he retorted. "It happened in a seaport, a good
many hundred miles up the coast. A poor girl lived there, with her
mother, in a hut. One night a great gale blew, so that everybody was