g the pursuit when he came on Dorothy and Elsie
sitting in a shady dell by the roadside, from which the wooded slopes
of the hills rose steeply. Careless of his boots and of the fact that
they had suffused his face with an unbecoming purple, he strode
gallantly up to them, and set about making Dorothy's acquaintance. He
began by talking, with an airy graciousness, of the charm of the spot
in which he had found her, and of how greatly that charm was enhanced
by her presence. But soon, seeing that she took not the slightest
notice of him, that her eyes, to all seeming, looked through him at the
trees on the further side of the dell, he lost his gracious air, and
began to halt and stumble in his speech. Then he lost his head and
plunged into a detailed account of the passion with which Dorothy's
beauty had inflamed his heart, wearing the while his finest air of a
conqueror dictating terms.

Dorothy surveyed him with a contemptuous wonder, over which her sense
of the ludicrous was slowly gaining the mastery; Elsie stared at him.
At last he ended the impassioned description of his emotions with a yet
more impassioned appeal to Dorothy to fly with him to a far-off shore
forever shining with the golden light of love; and Dorothy laughed a
gentle laugh of pure amusement.

Count Sigismond flushed purpler; his eyes stood well out of his head;
he drew himself up with a superb air--a little spoiled by a wince as
his left boot deftly reminded him that he was wearing it, and cried,
"Ha! You laugh! You laugh at Sigismond de Puy-de-Dome! Mon Dieu!
You shall learn!" And with a sudden spring he grabbed at her.

She jerked aside, sprang up, and away from him. But he was between her
and the exit from the dell; he crouched with the impressive
deliberation of a villain in a melodrama for another spring, and Elsie
screamed, "Tinker! Tinker!"

Count Sigismond heard a rustling in the bushes above, and looked up to
see them parted by an angel child, in white ducks, bearing a bunch of
lilies in his hand, who gazed at him with a serious, almost pained
face, and leapt lightly down.

With a "Pah! Imbecile!" addressed to himself for delaying, the Count
sprang towards Dorothy, was conscious of a swift white streak, and the
head of the angel child, impelled by wiry muscles and a weight of
seventy-six pounds, smote as a battering ram upon the first and second
buttons of his waistcoat. He doubled up and sat down hard in one
movement; th