cenery had
come for the play advertised. It was worth trying here.

"Dear people," said Patsy O'Connell-St. Regis, smiling at the
audience as one friend to another, "I have had so many requests from
among you--since I made out my program--to give instead an evening of
old Irish tales, that I have--capitulated; you shall have your wish."

The almost unbelievable applause that greeted her tempted her to
further wickedness. "Very few people seem ever to remember that I had
an Irish grandfather, Denis St. Regis, and that I like once in a
while to be getting back to the sod."

There was something so hypnotic in her intimacy--this taking of every
one into her confidence--that one budding youth forgot himself
entirely and naively remarked, "It's a long way to Tipperary."

That clinched her success. She might have chanted "Old King Cole" and
reaped a houseful of applause. As it was, she turned faery child and
led them all forth to the Land of Faery--a world that neighbored so
close to the real with her that long ago she had acquired the habit
of carrying a good bit of it about with her wherever she went. It was
small wonder, therefore, that, at the end of the evening, when she
fixed upon a certain young man in the audience--a man with a
persevering mustache, an esthetic face, and a melancholy, myopic
squint--and told the last tale to him direct, that he felt called
upon to go to her as she came down the steps into the ball-room and
express his abject, worshipful admiration.

"That's all right," Patsy cut him short, "but--but--it would sound so
much nicer outside, somewhere in the moonlight--away from everybody.
Wouldn't it, now?"

This sudden amending of matter-of-factness with arch coquetry would
have sounded highly amusing to ears less self-atuned than the
erstwhile wearer of the Balmacaan. But he heard in it only the
flattering tribute to a man chosen of men; and the hand that reached
for Patsy's was almost masterful.

"Oh, would you really?" he asked, and he almost broke his melancholy
with a smile.

"It must be my clothes," was her mental comment as he led her away;
"they've gone to my own head; it's not altogether strange they've
touched his a bit. But for a man who's forged his father's name and
lost the girl he loved and then plunged into mortal despair, he's
convalescing terribly fast."

They had reached a quiet corner of the veranda. Patsy dropped into a
chair, while her companion leaned against a near-by