et me detain you," she said, "if
you have any engagement."

Amelius silently looked round him for his hat. On a table behind him
a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern
"illustrations" which present the English art of our day in its laziest
and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing
trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with
enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with
the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this
imbecile production put its trust in the printer, whose charitable types
helped it, at the bottom of the page, with the title of "Love at First
Sight." On those remarkable words Amelius seized, with the desperation
of the drowning man, catching at the proverbial straw. They offered him
a chance of pleading his cause, this time, with a happy indirectness
of allusion at which not even a young lady's susceptibility could take
offence.

"Do you believe in that?" he said, pointing to the illustration.

Regina declined to understand him. "In what?" she asked.

"In love at first sight."

It would be speaking with inexcusable rudeness to say plainly that she
told him a lie. Let the milder form of expression be, that she modestly
concealed the truth. "I don't know anything about it," she said.

_"I_ do," Amelius remarked smartly.

She persisted in looking at the illustration. Was there an infection
of imbecility in that fatal work? She was too simple to understand him,
even yet! "You do--what?" she inquired innocently.

"I know what love at first sight is," Amelius burst out.

Regina turned over the leaves of the magazine. "Ah," she said, "you have
read the story."

"I haven't read the story," Amelius answered. "I know what I felt
myself--on being introduced to a young lady."

She looked up at him with a sly smile. "A young lady in America?" she
asked.

"In England, Miss Regina." He tried to take her hand--but she kept
it out of his reach. "In London," he went on, drifting back into his
customary plainness of speech. "In this very street," he resumed,
seizing her hand before she was aware of him. Too much bewildered to
know what else to do, Regina took refuge desperately in shaking hands
with him. "Goodbye, Mr. Goldenheart," she said--and gave him his
dismissal for the second time.

Amelius submitted to his fate; there was something in her eyes which
warned him that he