random.

"Some folk call him that, and it is the worst thing I know of him so
far. It may spoil him in time; but at present I find him a nice young
man."

Joan swung round to her picture. "If Alec had the chance of becoming a
King, he would be a very good one," she said loyally.

Poluski's wizened cheeks puckered into a grin. He glanced at the easel
and thence to the picture on the wall.

"Perfectly, my dear Joan," he said. "And, by the bones of Kosciusko, you
have chosen a proper subject, The Fortune Teller! Were you filling our
warrior with dreams of empire? Well, well, I don't know which is more
potent with monarchs, woman or dynamite. In Alec's case I fancy I should
bet on the woman. Here, for example, is one that shook Heaven, and I
have always thought that Eve was not given fair treatment, or she would
surely have twisted the serpent's tail," and, humming the refrain of
"Les Demi-Vierges," he climbed the small platform he had erected in
front of the world famous Murillo.

Back to back, separated by little more than half the width of the
gallery, Joan and Poluski worked steadily for twenty minutes. The Pole
sang to himself incessantly, now bassooning between his thin lips the
motif of some rhapsody of Lizst's, now murmuring the words of some
catchy refrain from the latest review. Anybody else who so transgressed
the rules would have been summarily turned out by the guards; but the
men knew him, and the Grande Galerie, despite its treasures, or perhaps
because of them, is the least popular part of the Louvre. Artists haunt
it; but the Parisian, the provincial, the globe trotter, gape once in
their lives at Andrea del Sarto, Titian, Salvator Rosa, Murillo of
course, and the rest of the mighty dead, and then ask with a yawn,
"Where are the Crown Jewels?"

So the Humming Bee annoyed none by his humming; but he stopped short in
an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and
Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of
distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist
his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas,
was aware of the movement. She too turned.

"I am going," she announced. "I cannot do anything right to-day. Just
look at that white feather!"

"Where?"

"In the boy's hat, you tease! Where else would you look?"

"In your face, _belle mignonne_," said the Pole.

It was true. Joan was not ill; but she was