y:

"I do, or I would not go armed," it said.

She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow,
delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering
interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back
with still another postscript:

"Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a
thing to think of in that way."

This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was
wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack's last
communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!"
in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either
duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of
desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.

"Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the
kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him
standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor;
"yes, biting into very rich meat."

He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced
uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.

"Professor Giuccamini's researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But
come! You are hungry!"

Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-shell spectacles, he
passed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under
a pavilion.

"In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal
spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang
pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect--cheaper,
even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was
desert six years ago."

The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea
vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of
peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a
broad path between rows of young palms.

Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of
the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her
as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set
right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose
boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the
slender bronze vase on the table.

"Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room ag