onary, but Anne Wellington paid but
slight attention. While the good clergyman warned his hearers of the
terrible reckoning which must eventually come from neglect by the upper
classes of the thousands born month after month in squalor and reared
amid sordid, vicious surroundings, the girl's eyes rarely wandered from
the two men in front of her. It was uplifting, conducive to healthful,
normal emotions to look at them, and such emotions were exactly what
she needed.

Radiating, as it were, from Prince Koltsoff was an influence she did
not like. On the contrary, feeling its power, she had begun to fear
it. He attracted her peculiarly. She could not quite explain the
sensation; it was indefinable, vague, but palpable nevertheless. Then
he was high in the Russian nobility, upon terms of friendship with the
Czar, a prominent figure in the highest society of European capitals.
His wife would at once take a position which any girl might covet.
True, she would probably be unhappy with him after the first bloom of
his devotion, but then she might not. She might be able to hold him.
Miss Wellington flattered herself that she could. And if not--well,
she would not be the first American girl to pocket that loss
philosophically and be content with the contractual profits that
remained. A Russian princess of the highest patent of nobility--there
was a thrill in that thought, which, while it did not dominate her,
might eventually have that effect.

At all events, she found it not at all objectionable that Prince
Koltsoff was apparently enamoured of her. Of this she was quite
certain. He had a way of looking his devotion. His luminous blue eyes
were wonderful in their expressiveness. They could convey almost any
impression in the gamut of human emotions, save perhaps kindliness, and
among other things they had told her he loved her.

That was flattering, but the trouble was that so often his eyes made
her blush confusedly without any reason more tangible than that he was
looking at her.

Anne Wellington was as thoroughly feminine as any girl that ever lived,
and had always gloried in her sex. She had never wished she were a
man. Still there is a happy mean for every normal American girl, and
already she had begun to wonder if the Prince was ever going to forget
that she was a woman and treat her as an ordinary human being, with the
question of sex in the abstract at least.

Yet on the other hand there was that thr