th a strap, and
produced a card.

"We may as well know each other's names," she cooed affably. "Here is
my card."

Helen read, "Mrs. H. de Courcy Vavasour, Villa Menini, Nice."

"I am sorry," she said, with a friendly smile that might have disarmed
prejudice, "but in the hurry of my departure from London I packed my
cards in my registered baggage. My name is Helen Wynton."

The eyeglasses went up once more.

"Do you spell it with an I? Are you one of the Gloucestershire
Wintons?"

"No. I live in town; but my home is in Norfolk."

"And whose party will you join at the Maloja?"

Helen colored a little under this rigorous heckling. "As I have
already told you, Mrs. Vavasour, I am alone," she said. "Indeed, I
have come here to--to do some literary work."

"For a newspaper?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Vavasour received this statement guardedly. If Helen was on the
staff of an important journal there was something to be gained by
being cited in her articles as one of the important persons
"sojourning" in the Engadine.

"It is really wonderful," she admitted, "how enterprising the great
daily papers are nowadays."

Helen, very new to a world of de Courcy Vavasours, and Wraggs, and
Burnham-Joneses, forgave this hawklike pertinacity for sake of the
apparent sympathy of her catechist. And she was painfully candid.

"The weekly paper I represent is not at all well known," she
explained; "but here I am, and I mean to enjoy my visit hugely. It is
the chance of a lifetime to be sent abroad on such a mission. I little
dreamed a week since that I should be able to visit this beautiful
country under the best conditions without giving a thought to the
cost."

Poor Helen! Had she delved in many volumes to obtain material that
would condemn her in the eyes of the tuft hunter she was addressing,
she could not have shocked so many conventions in so few words. She
was poor, unknown, unfriended! Worse than these negative defects, she
was positively attractive! Mrs. Vavasour almost shuddered as she
thought of the son "missed" at Lucerne, the son who would arrive at
Maloja on the morrow, in the company of someone whom he preferred to
his mother as a fellow traveler. What a pitfall she had escaped! She
might have made a friend of this impossible person! Nevertheless,
rendered wary by many social skirmishes, she did not declare war at
once. The girl was too outspoken to be an adventuress. She must wait,
and watch, and furbish her weapons.