e our heads together over you." My bewilderment was infinite,
but it stopped short of being unpleasant.

"Might I call on my aunt?" I asked. "It wouldn't interfere--"

"Oh, it wouldn't _interfere_," she said, "but we leave for Paris
to-morrow. We are very busy. We--that is, my aunt; I am too young and
too, too discreet--have a little salon where we hatch plots against half
the regimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are."

"I don't understand in the least," I said; "not in the least."

"Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand," she
answered, "and you won't do that. I tell you plainly that I find my
account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere.
You will see."

She spoke with her monstrous dispassionateness, and I felt a shiver pass
down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever
she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way--as her
husband, for example.

"I wish you would talk sense--for one blessed minute," I said; "I want
to get things a little settled in my mind."

"Oh, I'll talk sense," she said, "by the hour, but you won't listen.
Take your friend, Churchill, now. He's the man that we're going to bring
down. I mentioned it to you, and so...."

"But this is sheer madness," I answered.

"Oh, no, it's a bald statement of fact," she went on.

"I don't see how," I said, involuntarily.

"Your article in the _Hour_ will help. Every trifle will help," she
said. "Things that you understand and others that you cannot.... He is
identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it's
fatal. There will be friendships ... and desertions."

"Ah!" I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her
insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom
everybody--perhaps from fear--pretended to trust. She looked at me and
smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day
and pensive to-morrow. "Do you know I don't like to hear that?" I began.

"Oh, there's irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing," she said,
with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. "He goes into it
clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it's his
last chance. It's not that he's worn out--but he feels that his time has
come--unless he does something. And so he's going to do something. You
understand?"

"Not in the least," I said, light-heart