for the first time since he has been here."

I shifted my position.

"You evidently keep an eye on him, Mr. Quinby."

"I do, Clephane. I find him a diverting study. He is not the only one in
this hotel. There's old Teale on his balcony at the present minute, if
you look up. He has the best room in the hotel; the only trouble is that
it doesn't face the sun all day; he's not used to being in the shade,
and you'll hear him damn the limelight-man in heaps one of these fine
mornings. But your enterprising young friend is a more amusing person
than Belgrave Teale."

I had heard enough of my enterprising young friend from this quarter.

"Do you never make any expeditions yourself, Mr. Quinby?"

"Sometimes." Quinby looked puzzled. "Why do you ask?" he was constrained
to add.

"You should have volunteered instead of Mrs. Lascelles to-day. It would
have been an excellent opportunity for prosecuting your own rather
enterprising studies."

One would have thought that one's displeasure was plain enough at last;
but not a bit of it. So far from resenting the rebuff, the fellow
plucked my sleeve, and I saw at a glance that he had not even listened
to my too elaborate sarcasm.

"Talk of the--lady!" he whispered. "Here she comes."

And a second glance intercepted Mrs. Lascelles on the steps, with her
bold good looks and her fine upstanding carriage, cut clean as a
diamond in that intensifying atmosphere, and hardly less dazzling to the
eye. Yet her cotton gown was simplicity's self; it was the right setting
for such natural brilliance, a brilliance of eyes and teeth and
colouring, a more uncommon brilliance of expression. Indeed it was a
wonderful expression, brave rather than sweet, yet capable of sweetness
too, and for the moment at least nobly free from the defensive
bitterness which was to mark it later. So she stood upon the steps, the
talk of the hotel, trailing, with characteristic independence, a cane
chair behind her, while she sought a shady place for it, even as I had
stood seeking for her: before she found one I was hobbling toward her.

"Oh, thanks, Captain Clephane, but I couldn't think of allowing you!
Well, then, between us, if you insist. Here under the wall, I think, is
as good a place as any."

She pointed out a clear space in the rapidly narrowing ribbon of shade,
and there I soon saw Mrs. Lascelles settled with her book (a trashy
novel, that somehow brought Catherine Evers rather sharply before my
m