Even the astute Antoine, who had lived long in the boulevards
of Paris, and who therefore knew an American when he saw one at any
distance or at any price, evinced no uncertainty in proclaiming them
Americans.

Miss Pelham, the stenographer from West Twenty-third Street, might have
been included in the circle from the first had not her dignity stood in
the way. For six days she held resolutely aloof from everything except
her notebook and her machine, but her stock of novels beginning to run
low, and the prospect of being bored to extinction for six months to
come looming up before her, she concluded to wave the olive branch in
the face of social ostracism, assuming a genial attitude of
condescension, which was graciously overlooked by the others. As she
afterward said, there is no telling how low she might have sunk, had it
not entered her head one day to set her cap for the unsuspecting Mr.
Saunders. She had learned, in the wisdom of her sex, that he was fancy
free. Mr. Saunders, fully warned against the American typewriter girl as
a class, having read the most shocking jokes at her expense in the comic
papers, was rather shy at the outset, but Britt gallantly came to Miss
Pelham's defence and ultimate rescue by emphatically assuring Saunders
that she was a perfect lady, guaranteed to cause uneasiness to no man's
wife.

"But I have no wife," quickly protested Saunders, turning a dull red.

"The devil!" exclaimed Britt, apparently much upset by the revelation.

But of this more anon.

* * * * *

Browne conducted the two young women across the drawbridge and to the
sunlit edge of the terrace, where two servants awaited them with
parasols.

"Isn't it extraordinary, the trouble one is willing to take for the
merest glimpse of a man?" sighed Lady Agnes. "At home we try to avoid
them."

"Indeed?" said pretty Mrs. Browne, with a slight touch of irony. It was
the first sign of the gentle warfare which their wits were to wage.

"There he is! See him?" almost whispered Browne, as if the solitary,
motionless figure at the foot of the avenue was likely to hear his voice
and be frightened away.

The Enemy was sitting serenely on one of the broad iron benches just
inside the gates to the park, his arms stretched out along the back, his
legs extended and crossed. The great stone wall behind him afforded
shelter from the broiling sun; satinwood trees lent an appearance of
coolness that did