authority, and could not indulge in such an excitement as an afternoon
in her society without his permission. Zara bore me out in this
assertion, and added for me to Mrs. Everard:

"Indeed, I think it will be better for her to remain perfectly quiet
with us for a day or two longer; then she will be thoroughly cured, and
free to do as she likes."

"Well!" said Mrs. Challoner; "I must say she doesn't look as if
anything were the matter with her. In fact, I never saw two more happy,
healthy-looking girls than you both. What secret do you possess to make
yourselves look so bright?"

"No secret at all," replied Zara, laughing; "we simply follow the exact
laws of health, and they suffice."

Colonel Everard, who had been examining me critically and asking me a
few questions, here turned to Zara and said:

"Do you really mean to say, Madame Casimir, that your brother cured
this girl by electricity?"

"Purely so!" she answered earnestly.

"Then it's the most wonderful recovery _I_ ever saw. Why, at Cannes,
she was hollow-eyed, pale, and thin as a willow-wand; now she
looks--well, she knows how she is herself--but if she feels as spry as
she looks, she's in first-rate training!"

I laughed.

"I DO feel spry, Colonel," I said. "Life seems to me like summer
sunshine."

"Brava!" exclaimed Mr. Challoner. He was a staid, rather slow
Kentuckian who seldom spoke; and when he did, seemed to find it rather
an exertion. "If there's one class of folk I detest more than another,
it is those all-possessed people who find life unsuited to their
fancies. Nobody asked them to come into it--nobody would miss them if
they went out of it. Being in it, it's barely civil to grumble at the
Deity who sent them along here. I never do it myself if I can help it."

We laughed, and Mrs. Challoner's eyes twinkled.

"In England, dear, for instance," she said, with a mischievous glance
at her spouse--"in England you never grumbled, did you?"

Mr. Challoner looked volumes--his visage reddened, and he clenched his
broad fist with ominous vigour.

"Why, by the Lord!" he said, with even more than his usual deliberate
utterance, "in England the liveliest flea that ever gave a triumphal
jump in air would find his spirits inclined to droop! I tell you,
ma'am," he continued, addressing himself to Zara, whose merry laugh
rang out like a peal of little golden bells at this last remark--"I
tell you that when I walked in the streets of London I used to