e feather from between her lips and tapped the blotting-pad
with it impatiently.

'Why should I trouble my head or my heart about him?' she asked herself
bitterly. 'He doesn't trouble his head or his heart about me.'

But she felt ashamed of her petulant speech immediately. She seemed to
see the grave, sweet face of the Dictator looking down at her in
surprise; she seemed to see the strong soldierly face of Captain
Sarrasin frown upon her sternly.

'Ah,' she meditated with a sigh, 'it is only natural that he should fall
in love with a girl like that. She can be of use to him--of use to his
cause. What use can I be to him or to his cause? There is nothing I can
do except to look out for a possible South American with an especially
dark skin and especially curly moustache.'

As she reflected thus, her eye, wandering over the populous thoroughfare
and the verdure beyond, populous also, noted, or rather accepted, the
presence of one particular man out of the many. The one particular man
was walking slowly up and down on the roadside opposite to the hotel by
the Park railings. That he was walking up and down Dolores became
conscious of through the fact that, having half unconsciously seen him
once float into her ken, she noted him again, with some slight surprise,
and was aware of him yet a third time with still greater surprise. The
man paced slowly up and down on what appeared to be a lengthy beat, for
Dolores mentally calculated that something like a minute must have
elapsed between each glimpse of his face as he moved in the direction in
which she most readily beheld him. He was a man a little above the
middle height, with a keen, aquiline face, smooth-shaven, and
red-haired. There was nothing in his dress to render him in the least
remarkable; he was dressed like everybody else, Dolores said to herself,
and it must therefore have been his face that somehow or other attracted
her vagrant fancy. Yet it was not a particularly attractive face in any
sense. It was not a comely face which would compel the admiring
attention of a girl, nor was it a face so strongly marked, so out of the
ordinary lines, as to command attention by its ugliness or its strength
of character. It was the smooth-shaven face of an average man of a
fair-haired race; there was something Scotch about it--Lowland Scotch,
the kind of face of which one might see half a hundred in an hour's
stroll along the main street of Glasgow or Prince's Street in Edi