d on fold like the petals of an unopened magnolia flower.
As he looked, it came gliding towards him with the floating ease of an
air bubble, and the strong radiance of the large moon showed its
woman's face, pale with the moonbeam pallor, and set in a wave of hair
that swept back from the brows and fell in a loosely twisted coil like
a shining snake stealthily losing itself in folds of misty drapery. He
rose to meet the advancing phantom.

"Entirely for effect!" he said, "Well planned and quite worthy of you!
All for effect!"

CHAPTER II

A laugh, clear and cold as a sleigh-bell on a frosty night rang out on
the silence.

"Why did you run away from me?"

He replied at once, and brusquely.

"Because I was tired of you!"

She laughed again. A strange white elf as she looked In the spreading
moonbeams she was woman to the core, and the disdainful movement of her
small uplifted head plainly expressed her utter indifference to his
answer.

"I followed you"--she said--"I knew I should find you! What are you
doing up here? Shamming to be ill?"

"Precisely! 'Sham' is as much in my line as yours. I have to 'pretend'
in order to be real!"

"Paradoxical as usual!" and she shrugged her shoulders--"Anyway you've
chosen a good place to do your shamming in. It's quite lovely up
here,--much better than the Plaza. I am at the Plaza."

"Automobile and all I suppose!" he said, sarcastically--"How many
servants?--how many boxes with how many dresses?"

She laughed again.

"That's no concern of yours!" she replied--"I am my own mistress."

"More's the pity!" he retorted.

They faced each other. The moon, now soaring high in clear space, shed
a luminous rain of silver over all the visible breadth of wild country,
and their two figures looked mere dark silhouettes half drowned in the
pearly glamour.

"It's worth travelling all the long miles to see!" she declared,
stretching her arms out with an enthusiastic gesture--"Oh, beautiful
big moon of California! I'm glad I came!"

He was silent.

"You are not glad!" she continued--"You are a bear-man in hiding, and
the moon says nothing to you!"

"It says nothing because it IS nothing"--he answered, impatiently--"It
is a dead planet without heart,--a mere shell of extinct volcanoes
where fire once burned, and its light is but the reflection of the sun
on its barren surface. It is like all women,--but mostly like YOU!"

She made him a sweeping curtsy so exquisitely