on your
way to join me after months of frivoling with a hay-camp, have been
forced by telegram to depart before the _fete de nuit_ to which Miss
Sherrill begged our attendance. Rest assured he knows that too.
Therefore, to unmask unobtrusively and slip away to his room, and in
the absence of other guests to linger for a week of incognito
quiet--_voila_! he is quite safe though imprudent!"

Greek and Bedouin fell silent, watching the laughing pageant in the
garden.

Venetian lamps glowed like yellow witch-lights in the branches;
fountains tossed moon-bright sprays of quicksilver aloft and tinkled
with the splash; the waters of a sunken pool, jeweled in stars,
glimmered darkly green through files of cypress. All in all, an
entrancing moon-mad world of mystery and dusk-moths, heavy with the
scent of jasmine and orange. And the moon played brightly on curious
folk, on spangles and jewels and masked and laughing eyes.

A gray mendicant monk with sombre, thin-lipped face beneath a grayish
mask slipped furtively by with a curious air of listening intently to
the careless chatter about him; a fat and plaintive Queen Elizabeth
followed, talking to a stout courtier who was over-trusting the seams
of his satin breeches.

"I doubt if you'll believe me," puffed Queen Elizabeth dolorously, "but
every day since that time she deliberately went out and lost herself
all day in the flat-woods and stopped to look at that ridiculous cart
with the wheel of flame when I was sure a buzzard had bitten her--No!
No! I don't know, Jethro; I'm sure I don't. How should I know why it
was burning? But it was. She said plainly that it was a cart wheel of
fire and if it was a wheel it must certainly have been on something and
what on earth would a wheel be on but a cart? Certainly one wouldn't
buy a bale of cart wheels to make fires in the flat-woods. Well, it's
the strangest thing, Jethro, but nearly every day since, she's visited
the flat-woods and wandered about with that terrible Indian girl who
isn't an Indian girl. Seems that she's a most extraordinary girl with
a foster-father and she sells sand mounds--no, that's not it--the
things they find in them besides the sand--and she has a queer, wild
sort of culture and her father was white. Like as not Diane will come
home some night scalped and she has such magnificent hair, Jethro. To
her knees it is and so black! And what must she and Ann do to-night
but--there, I promised Diane f