lamp turned low. The flutist fluted on. From the melody it appeared that
the musician had at some date not indicated, and under some
unaccountable influence, dreamt that he dwelt in marble halls with
vassals and serfs at his side. The man at his back had come as near as
the darkness would cover him, but there had stopped.

Presently the music ceased, but another sound, sweeter than all music,
kissed, as it were, the serenader's ear. It was the wary lifting of a
window-sash. He ran forward into the narrow shade of the house itself,
and lost to the restraints of reason, carried away on transports of
love, without hope of any reply, whispered, "Daphne!"

And a tender whisper came back--"Wait a minute."

"You'll come down?" he whisperously asked; but the window closed on his
words, the dim light vanished, and all was still.

He was watching, on his left, the batten shutters of the sitting-room,
when a small, unnoticed door near the dark, rear corner of the house
clicked and then faintly creaked. Mr. Pettigrew became one tremolo of
ecstasy. He glided to the spot, not imagining even then that he was to
be granted more than a moment's interview through an inch or two of
opening, when what was his joy to see the door swiftly spread wide
inward by a dim figure that extended her arms in gracious invitation.

"O love!" was all his passion could murmur as they clasped in the
blessed dark, while she, not waiting to hear word or voice, rubbed half
the rice powder and rouge from her lips and cheeks to his and cried,

"O you sweet, speckle', yalleh niggeh liah, you tol' me you on'y play de
fife in de similitude o' ligislation!"

As Dinwiddie silently but violently recoiled Daphne Jane half stifled a
scream, sprang through a stair door, shot the bolt and rushed upstairs.
At the same instant he heard behind him a key slipped from its lock. He
glanced back in affright, and trembling on legs too limp to lift, dimly
saw the outer door swing to. As the darkness changed to blackness he
heard the key re-enter its lock and turn on the outside. The pirate was
a prisoner.

Daphne Jane, locking everything as she fled, whirled into her mistress's
room and out of her mistress's clothes. Though quaking with apprehension
so that she could scarcely button her own things on again, she was
filled with the joy of adventure and a revel of vanity and mirth. The
moment she could complete her change of dress and whisk her borrowed
fineries back into