and had asked the manager of the
theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and
Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage,
where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go
on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a
bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully
plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather
contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to
blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment,
"I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these
days--or nights, Miss Mamise."

She had grumbled, "Much ubbliged!" and returned to the ape, while
Davidge slunk away, ashamed.

He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never
seen "Mamise" in the electric lights. He had never found the name in
any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner--Spanish,
Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her
nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what
had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or
been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible
conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten
admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd
of peeresses and plutocrats in London.

He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had
had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and
then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided
that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and
confused.

But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this
tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his
lost Mamise.

If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so
often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after
all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie
Louise together again so much as the man's hatred of leaving anything
unfinished--even a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking
Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a
snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.

A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him
respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him
staring at