done tell you dat? You's at Wa'trace
Hall--Mahsteh Majah's new country-house; yes, sah; dat's whah you
is--kee-hee!"

"And who is 'Master Major'?" pressed Blount, whose bewilderment grew
with every fresh attempt to dispel it.

"A-ain't she tell you dat?--kee-hee! Ev'body knows Mahsteh Majah; yes,
sah. If de mistis ain't tell you, ol' Barnabas ain't gwine to--no, sah.
Ah'll bring yo'-all's coffee in de mawnin'; yes, sah--good-night,
sah--kee-hee!" And the door closed silently upon the wrinkled old face
and the bobbing head.

Having nothing else to do, Blount went to bed, but sleep came
reluctantly. Life is said to be full of paper walls thinly dividing the
commonplace from the amazing; and he decided that he had surely burst
through one of them when he had given place to the vagrant impulse
prompting him to go horseback-riding when he should have gone
comfortably to bed in his sleeper to wait for the track-clearing.

Whither had a curiously bizarre fate led him? Where was "Wartrace Hall,"
and who was "Mahsteh Majah"? Who was the winsome little lady who looked
as if she might be twenty, and had all the wit and wisdom of the ages at
her tongue's end--who had held him so nearly spellbound over the teacups
that he had entirely lost sight of everything but his hospitable
welcome?

These and kindred speculations kept him awake for a long time after the
door had closed behind the ancient negro; and he was just dropping off
into his first loss of consciousness when the familiar purring of a
motor-car aroused him. There was a window at his bed's head, and he
reached over and drew the curtain. The view gave upon the avenue of
cottonwoods and the circular carriage approach. A touring-car, with its
powerful head-lights paling the white radiance of the moon, was drawn up
at the steps, and he had a glimpse of a big man, swathed from head to
heel in a dust-coat, descending from the tonneau.

"I suppose that will be 'Mahsteh Majah,'" he mused sleepily. "That's
why the little lady was sitting up so late--she was waiting for him."
Then to the thronging queries threatening to return and keep him awake:
"Scat!--go away! call it a pipe-dream and let me go to sleep!"

V

AT WARTRACE HALL

In his most imaginative moments, Evan Blount had never prefigured a
home-coming to coincide in any detail of it with the reality.

When he opened his eyes on the morning following the night of singular
adventures, the sun was shining br