trembling, but her eyes blazed at me
disdainfully. I felt almost like a caitiff, whatever that may be.

"It doesn't worry me," she denied, with the same crisp iciness, "but it
does surprise me. Will you tell me, please, what you are doing here?"

Should I return, "And you?" in a voice of obvious meaning? Should I take
a leaf from the book of my hostess and say: "I'm a bit of an artist.
I've sketched all over Europe, and I've come to have a go at the old
mill that so many fellows try?" Such a claim would just match the
assumption of her costume. But no.

"The fact is," I said serenely, "I came straight from the rue
St. Dominique to keep the appointment you forgot."

The announcement, it was plain, exasperated her, for slightly, but
undeniably, she stamped one arched, slender, attractively shod foot.

"Mr. Bayne," she demanded, "are you a secret-service agent?"

"Good heavens!" I exclaimed, startled. "No!"

"Then I'm sorry. That would have been a better reason for following me
than--than the only one there is," she swept on stormily. "You knew I
didn't wish to see any one at present. I said so in the note I left. Yet
you spied on me and you tracked me deliberately, when I had trusted
you with my address. It's outrageous of you. You ought to be ashamed of
doing it, Mr. Bayne."

A stunned realization burst on me of the line that she was taking, the
position into which, willy-nilly, she was crowding me. I had trailed her
here, she assumed, to thrust my company on her; and, upon the surface,
I had to own that my behavior really had that air. If I had followed her
with equal brazenness along Fifth Avenue, I should have had a chance to
explain my conduct to the first police officer who noticed it, later
to an indignant magistrate. But, heavens and earth! She knew why I had
come. And knowing, how did she dare defy me? I retained just sufficient
presence of mind to stare back impassively and to mumble with feeble
sarcasm:

"I'm very sorry you think so."

She came down a step.

"Are you?" she asked imperiously. "Then--will you prove it? Will you go
back to Paris by to-night's train?"

I had recovered myself.

"There isn't any train to-night," I protested, civil, but adamant.
"And--I'm sorry, but if there was I wouldn't take it--not until I've
accomplished what I came to do!"

The girl seemed to concentrate all the world's disdain in the look that
measured me, running from my head to my unoffending feet, from my f