ou try to hide beneath the garment of your kindness?
Think, when you judge me, what it is for a woman never to be
herself--always to have to play a part!"

He reached and took her hand suddenly, drawing her to him with a
movement that was almost rough.

"This is no play acting--this is real! No footlights--no audience--only
you and me in all this world!"

But she drew away, insistently aloof. She would have none of his
caresses.

"This, too," she said, as she moved apart and stood waiting for him to
follow, "is a part of the play--I do not deceive myself! When I go back
to my world--my trade, I shall remember this little time that you and I
have snatched from the grudging grasp of life as an act--a scene only!
It's a perfect pastoral, Man, dear, but unreal--absurdly unreal--and we
know it ourselves while we play the game!"

Down through the flower-bordered vista the cat went stalking his prey,
his sinuous body a tawny streak winding along the green path. These
trivial humans, with their subtle attractions and compunctions, were as
though they never had been when the chase was on--the real business and
purpose of life!

For the rest of the time they were together they avoided the personal.
Each felt the threat in the air and tacitly averted it. For that one
perfect day there should be no past, no future, nothing but the golden
present.

Swinging in his breeze-rocked hammock between door and window the man
lay awake through the long watches of the night, thinking, thinking,
while his heart sang. Toward dawn he fell into a deep sleep from which
he was only awakened by the cat springing up to lick his face in
reminder of breakfast.

It was when he came back from his plunge in the pool that he first
noticed a paper pinned to his door-post. Within its folds his doom was
penned!

"Even you, dear Man, could not wish me the impossible! That superstition
of my country is that to come true it must be the first wish of your
fete day--and by one who loves you! Alas, my old servant had already
wished--that he might get me started for home to-day! Clever
Friedrich--for he had also packed! When you read this I shall be far on
my way. You could never find me though you searched the earth--but you
will never try! It is well as it is, for you see--it was not friendship
after all!"

* * * * *

And yet there was a sequel. During the following year there dropped to
the man in his hard-pressed l