ely responsible for the unprecedented turn
of affairs, was vainly trying to repress a mischievous enjoyment of the
fact that her companion was patently out of his element; that his
drawing-room attitudes and demeanour struck an almost ludicrous note of
discord with the untamed majesty of his surroundings.

Face, figure, and point-device attire, culminating in a buttonhole of
freshly picked violets, stamped him as a man mentally and physically
addicted to the levels of life; a soldier of carpet conquests and
ball-room achievements. A brow not ill-formed, and a bold pair of
eyes, more green than brown, suggested some measure of cultivated
intelligence, without which Quita could not have endured his
companionship for many hours together. But the proportions of his
thick-set figure, and a certain amplitude of chin and jaw, bewrayed
him; classed him indubitably with the type for whom comfort and leisure
are the first and last words of life. The fact that he had ascended a
matter of fifteen hundred feet before daybreak, and that with no more
than the mildest sense of martyrdom, was proof conclusive that the
balance of power had been very completely upset; and it is quite in
keeping with the delicate irony of things that the one woman who had
succeeded in upsetting it was, at that moment, dissecting him with the
merciless accuracy of the artist.

"Poor man!" she remarked, sympathetically. "I'm afraid I have been
treating you rather mercilessly; and you don't look particularly happy
sitting on that deodar, either! I suppose I may consider it something
of a triumph to have dragged a high priest of the arm-chair
unprotesting up to the heights at this unearthly hour of the morning?"

"A triumph exclusively your own," he answered, with lingering emphasis.
"No other woman in the world could have achieved as much."

Quita glanced at him quizzically.

"I honestly wonder," she said slowly, "if you could reckon up at random
how many times you have said that sort of thing before."

Garth reddened visibly; less at the justice of the retort than at the
humiliation of being put out of countenance by a woman from whom he
desired no less a gift than the gift of herself.

"Well, I never meant it fair and square before," he declared stoutly.
Whereat, to his consternation, she laughed outright.

"You seem to have a high opinion of my powers of credulity! That is
too big a compliment for me to digest without salt! But I think we
h