ing altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,"
she finished, laughing.

"I remember," Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his
fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out under the
red window blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back
and forth in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert--a
blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here
and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline
of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--"I
remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive about
it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it
otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a birthmark, or something
not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of
Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty
often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to
study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken
up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of
generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt offerings of us
all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone
on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and
turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and
kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance."

"Poor little chap," said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier
than usual. "How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me
the latest news of him. I haven't heard, except through the press, for
a year or more. He was in Algeria then, in the valley of the Chelif,
riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his
usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the
Mohammedan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many
countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing
Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
in Florence once for weeks together."

"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long
enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear
from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."

"He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in
the publisher's hands by this time. I have bee