e coach. He
twisted in his saddle, pushed his sombrero higher on his head, and
dubiously watched her flying from him, a lithe, trim figure in snug
Hungarian jacket, the burnished tendrils fluttering on the nape of her
neck, the soft white veil trailing like a fleecy cloud from her black
_amazona_ hat. He bent a perplexed gaze to the road. "It's 'way,
'way beyond me," he told himself. Then he grew aware of a sense of
warmth on his forearm. Yes, he remembered. For an instant she had laid a
hand on his sleeve, and he had thrilled to the ineffable token of
nestling. He was never immune from her tantalizing contradictions. He
felt this one yet.

Hoofs pounded behind, and Mr. Boone drew up alongside. "She came back,
and made me get away from the coach," he announced. "Prob'bly she wanted
to cry some; she looked it."

Yet another of her contradictions!

"Then why in the nation," Driscoll demanded, "do you keep hanging round
that coach for? Look here Shanks, you make me plum' weary. The idea of
you falling in----"

"No more'n you, you innocent gamboling lamb of an ol' blatherskite." But
Daniel's steel blue eyes had softened to their gentlest. "Say Jack," he
added, "she's going back to Paris."

"Don't I know it? Lord A'mighty!"

"Go on, never mind me," said Mr. Boone. "Groan out loud, if you want to.
For she sho'ly is, yes, back to Paris. Now Buh'the"--The Troubadour's
_r's_ always liquefied dreamily with that name--"Buh'the has been
telling me a few things, and I'm sure reporter enough to scout out the
rest of the story, and it's just this--Jack, she's fair broken-hearted."

"Miss Burt?"

"No, no, the marchioness. She staked out a campaign over here, and it's
panned out all wrong, and it wasn't her fault either. Poor girl, no
wonder she might like to cry a little. She's lavished everything she had
on it too, ancestral chateau, and all that."

"But," said Driscoll quickly "she'll not suffer. There's her title----"

"Title?" exclaimed Daniel. "W'y, she's going to give that up too, not
having any chateau any more, and she'll trip blithely down among the
people again, where she says it's more comfortable anyhow. Title? Well,
you've suhtinly noticed that she always did take that humorously. Her
grandfather--Buh'the says--was right considerable of a jurist, used
scissors and paste, and helped make a scrap-book called the Napoleonic
code, and Nap the First changed him into a picayunish duke. But wasn't
the nobility of int