mar-Kalm well by
reputation, though I've never happened to meet him. He's a very familiar
figure on the Riviera." (I might have added, "especially in the Casino
at Monte Carlo," but I refrained, as I had not yet learned the
Countess's opinion of gambling as an occupation.) "Did you meet him here
for the first time?"

"No; I met him in Paris, where we stopped for a while after we crossed,
before we came here. I was so surprised when I saw him at our hotel the
very day after we arrived! It seemed such a coincidence, that our only
acquaintance over on this side should arrive at the same place when we
did."

"When is a coincidence not a coincidence?" pertly inquired Miss Beechy.
"Can you guess that conundrum, Cousin Maida?"

"You naughty girl!" exclaimed her mother.

"Well, you like me to be childish, don't you? And it's childish to be
naughty."

"Come, we'll go home at once," said the Countess, uneasily; and followed
by the tall girl and the little one, she tottered away, sweeping yards
of chiffon.

"I do hope she won't wear things like that when she's in--ahem!--_our_
motor-car," I remarked _sotto voce_, as Terry and I stood at the gate,
watching, if not speeding, our parting guests.

"I doubt very much if she'll ever be there," prophesied Terry, looking
handsome and thoroughly Celtic, wrapped in his panoply of gloom.

"Come away in, while I see if I can find you 'The harp that once through
Tara's halls,' to play your own funeral dirge on," said I. "You look as
if it would be the only thing to do you any good."

"It would certainly relieve my feelings," replied Terry, "but I could do
that just as well by punching your head, which would be simpler. Of all
the infernal--"

"Now don't be brutal!" I implored. "You were quite pleasant before the
ladies. Don't be a whited sepulchre the minute their backs are turned.
Think what I've gone through since I was alone with you last, you great
hulking animal."

"Animal yourself!" Terry had the ingratitude to retort. "What have _I_
gone through, I should like to ask?"

"I don't know what you've gone through, but I know how you behaved," I
returned, as we walked back to the magnolia tree. "Like a sulky barber's
block--I mean a barber's sulky block. No, I--but it doesn't signify.
Hullo, there's the universal provider, carrying off the tray. Felicite,
_mon ange_, say how you summoned that tea and those cakes and cream from
the vasty deep?"

"What Monsieur is pleased to m