of the bottle. Some of these fine days,
Woman-in-the-Woods, I shall take you on a jaunt with me and
Boris."

"It sounds promising," I admitted, cautiously.

"It is more. You shall learn all the fine points of out-of-door
housekeeping.--Drink your wine, Woman-in-the-Woods. You were pale,
very pale, when I came upon you. I was afraid something had been
troubling you."

"Something troubles everybody."

"Oh, bromidic Miss Smith!--Drink your wine, please. And do not look
doubtfully upon that sandwich. My man knows how to build them."

His man did. The sandwich was manna. The wine evidently came from
heaven.

"Now you have a color. I say, is Morenas going to do you, too?"

"Good gracious, no! But he has sketched Alicia a dozen times at
least."

"And me," said Mr. Jelnik, gloomily. "There's no evading the brute.
I turn like a weathercock; and there he is, with corrugated brow and
slitted eyes, studying me! And the baleful eye of The Author also
pursues me. Between them, I feel skinned."

"Mr. Morenas says you are a rare but quite perfect type," I told
him, mischievously.

The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type,
Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.

"Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else." And then,
terrified, I turned red.

"Oh, I know! You didn't mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet,
merely the truth as you see it. You are transparently truthful,
fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business
woman! You can't understand how that intrigues me!"

And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about
himself. I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home
in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which
his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer,
until her death. Then student days, and after that, foot-loose
wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.

His grandmother had dropped courtesies to kings; and mine had
dropped "aitches." His father had been a European celebrity, mine a
ship-chandler in Boston, U.S.A. Yet here we two were; and he might
have been a high-spirited and most beautiful little boy picnicking
with a sedate and old-maidish little girl.

"How old should you imagine me?" he flung the question like a
challenge, as if he had divined my thoughts.

"Oh, say, thirteen, going on fourteen."

"Dear Woman-in-the-Woods, I am thirty-three."

"You are older tha