ou have gone into retreat by reason of the exposure. I'll admit, for
your consolation, that he really took me in; and, further, I really
wonder who the devil he is,--or _was_! Our last interview at the Club,
after Chauvenet told his story, lingers with me disagreeably. I was
naturally pretty hot to find him playing the darkly mysterious, which
never did go with me,--after eating my bird and drinking my bottle. As a
precaution I have looked up Chauvenet to the best of my ability. At the
Austro-Hungarian Embassy they speak well of him. He's over here to
collect the price of a few cruisers or some such rubbish from one of our
sister republics below the Gulf. But bad luck to all foreigners! Me for
America every time!"

* * * * *

"Dear old Dick!" and she dropped the letter into a drawer and went out
into the sunshine, mounted her horse and turned toward the hills.

She had spent the intermediate seasons of the year at Storm Springs ever
since she could remember, and had climbed the surrounding hills and
dipped into the valleys with a boy's zest and freedom. The Virginia
mountains were linked in her mind to the dreams of her youth, to her
earliest hopes and aspirations, and to the books she had read, and she
galloped happily out of the valley to the tune of an old ballad. She rode
as a woman should, astride her horse and not madly clinging to it in the
preposterous ancient fashion. She had known horses from early years, in
which she had tumbled from her pony's back in the stable-yard, and she
knew how to train a horse to a gait and how to master a beast's fear; and
even some of the tricks of the troopers in the Fort Myer drill she had
surreptitiously practised in the meadow back of the Claiborne stable.

It was on Tuesday that John Armitage had appeared before her in the
pergola. It was now Thursday afternoon, and Chauvenet had been to see her
twice since, and she had met him the night before at a dance at one of
the cottages.

Judge Claiborne was distinguished for his acute and sinewy mind; but he
had, too, a strong feeling for art in all its expressions, and it was his
gift of imagination,--the ability to forecast the enemy's strategy and
then strike his weakest point,--that had made him a great lawyer and
diplomat. Shirley had played chess with her father until she had learned
to see around corners as he did, and she liked a problem, a test of wit,
a contest of powers. She knew how to wa