new toy at the ease with which
he conveyed to her the idea that his life had been an immeasurable dark
waste till she had dawned upon his enraptured vision. Her back was
toward the inn and across her shoulders he could see the swaying figures
in the ball room. The light from a garden lamp played upon her head and
brightened in her fair hair.

Miss Seebrook was speaking of music, and reciting the list of operas she
loved best when Archie's gaze was caught and held by a shadow that
flitted along an iron fire escape that zigzagged down from the fourth to
the first story of the long rambling inn.

"You seem very dreamy," remarked Miss Seebrook. "I know how that is for
I can dream for hours and hours."

"Yes; reverie; just floating on clouds, on and on," Archie replied,
though the shadow moving on and on along the side of the inn was
troubling him not a little.

"The stars were never so near as they are tonight," she said. "Was it
Shakspere or Longfellow who said, 'bright star, would I were steadfast
as thou art!'"

It was neither, Archie knew, but he said he thought the line occurred in
Hamlet.

"Do you think Hamlet was insane?" she asked.

"I sometimes think I am," replied Archie, watching the shadow on the inn
wall.

"Why, Mr. Comly, how absurd!"

It was really not so absurd at the moment, but he again had recourse to
the poets, devoutly praying that she would not look toward the inn. He
had surmised that the Governor's declared purpose to call on an old
friend in Cornford was merely to cover his withdrawal from the party;
but that he could have meditated a predatory excursion through the inn
had not entered into Archie's speculations as to his friend's absence.
There was no mistaking the figure that had moved swiftly down the
ladder. The Governor for a man of his compact build was amazingly agile
and quick of foot and hand. He was now creeping along the little balcony
at the third floor. He paused a moment and then vanished into an open
window. The Governor had said that the Seebrook party had rooms just
under their own; but--

"I have chosen a star for you," Miss Seebrook was murmuring.

Archie, in his preoccupation with the Governor's strange performance,
was so slow to respond that Miss Seebrook, thinking that he was
deliberating as to which star he should bestow upon her in return,
generously broadened the scope of her offer.

"You shall have Orion or Arcturus with his sons."

"I never could find Or