t almost "Yis."

"Then you're right and I'm wrong. I beg your pardon."

"Daon't mention it," said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady
Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the decency to reproach
herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at
once through the sieve of her memory.

Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long
column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait
till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up
into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that
changes an it to a him or a her.

The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and
outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for
giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.

In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something
mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached
prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what
really happened--which was, that she retained no impression of him at
all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he
had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never
forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her.

He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a
resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a
moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams--a
girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western
state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of
instruments--xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions,
cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This
girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of
the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she
had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and
the strange cry she put into her music.

When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels
on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom
from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman
tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too,
in four voices--in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and
finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They
called her "Mamise, the Quartet in One."

Davidge had thought her marvelous