rced with a couple of
gold-banded ones with the real fragrance, permitted Billy to learn
that the blue-eyed one's name was Beecher, Arlee Beecher, and that
she was in the company of two ladies entitled Mrs. and Miss
Eversham. The Miss Eversham was quite old enough to be entitled
otherwise. They were occupied, the clerk reported, with nerves and
dissatisfaction. Miss Beecher appeared occupied in part--with a
correspondence that would swamp a foreign office.

* * * * *

Now it is always a question whether being at the same hotel does or
does not constitute an introduction. Sometimes it does; sometimes it
does not. When the hotel is a small and inexpensive arrangement in
Switzerland, where the advertised view of the Alpengluehen is
obtained by placing the chairs in a sociable circle on the sidewalk,
then usually it does. When the hotel is a large and expensive affair
in gayest Cairo, where the sunny and shady side rub elbows, and
gamesters and debutantes and touts and school teachers and vivid
ladies of conspicuous pasts and stout gentlemen of exhilarated
presents abound, in fact where innocent sightseers and initiated
traffickers in human frailties are often indistinguishable, then
decidedly it does not.

But fate, still smiling, dropped a silver shawl in Billy's path as
he was trailing his prey through the lounge after dinner. The shawl
belonged, most palpably, to a German lady three feet ahead of him,
but gripping it triumphantly, he bounded over the six feet which
separated him from the Eversham-Beecher triangle and with marvelous
self-restraint he touched Miss Eversham on the arm.

"You dropped this?" he inquired.

Miss Eversham looked surprisedly at Billy and uncertainly at the
shawl, which she mechanically accepted. "Why I--I didn't remember
having it with me," she hesitated.

"I noticed you were wearing one other evenings," said Billy, the
Artful, "so I thought----"

"You know whether this is yours or not, don't you, Clara?"
interposed the mother.

"They all look alike," murmured Clara Eversham, eying helplessly the
silver border.

Billy permitted himself to look at Miss Beecher. That young person
was looking at him and there was a disconcerting gaiety in her
expression, but at sight of him she turned her head, faintly
coloring. He judged she recalled his unmannerly eavesdropping that
afternoon.

"Pardon--excuse me--but that is to me belonging," panted an agitated
but