ard, of Portland, a pretty and bright
girl, affianced to his best friend in New York.

With much less pleasure, Fisher learned that the Baron Savitch was in
Paris, fresh from the Berlin Congress, and that he was the lion of the
hour with the select few who read between the written lines of
politics and knew the dummies of diplomacy from the real players in
the tremendous game. Dr. Rapperschwyll was not with the Baron. He was
detained in Switzerland, at the deathbed of his aged mother.

This last piece of information was welcome to Fisher. The more he
reflected upon the interview on the Mercuriusberg, the more strongly
he felt it to be his intellectual duty to persuade himself that the
whole affair was an illusion, not a reality. He would have been glad,
even at the sacrifice of his confidence in his own astuteness, to
believe that the Swiss doctor had been amusing himself at the expense
of his credulity. But the remembrance of the scene in the Baron's
bedroom at the Badischer Hof was too vivid to leave the slightest
ground for this theory. He was obliged to be content with the thought
that he should soon place the broad Atlantic between himself and a
creature so unnatural, so dangerous, so monstrously impossible as the
Baron Savitch.

Hardly a week had passed before he was thrown again into the society
of that impossible person.

The ladies of the American party met the Russian Baron at a ball in
the New Continental Hotel. They were charmed with his handsome face,
his refinement of manner, his intelligence and wit. They met him
again at the American Minister's, and, to Fisher's unspeakable
consternation, the acquaintance thus established began to make rapid
progress in the direction of intimacy. Baron Savitch became a frequent
visitor at the Hotel Splendide.

Fisher does not like to dwell upon this period. For a month his peace
of mind was rent alternately by apprehension and disgust. He is
compelled to admit that the Baron's demeanor toward himself was most
friendly, although no allusion was made on either side to the incident
at Baden. But the knowledge that no good could come to his friends
from this association with a being in whom the moral principle had no
doubt been supplanted by a system of cog-gear, kept him continually in
a state of distraction. He would gladly have explained to his American
friends the true character of the Russian, that he was not a man of
healthy mental organization, but merely a marv