ere
were matter for surprise in the sound of it.

"Like a monstrosity going to a fair," he said. "And I shall go with you.
I will even lunch with you at the station--a station steak and a beery
table. There is only one room at the station for those who eat and
those who await their trains. So that the eaters eat before a famished
audience like Louis XVI., and the travellers sit among the crumbs. I am
with you. But let us be quick--and get it over. Did you see Bukaty?" he
asked, finally, and, leaning forward, he sought an imaginary fly on the
lower parts of his horse; for, after all, he was only a man, and lacked
the higher skill or the thicker skin of the gentler sex in dealing with
certain delicate matters.

"No, I only saw the princess," replied Cartoner. And they rode on in
silence.

"You know," said Deulin, at length, gravely, "if that happens which you
expect and I expect, and everybody here is hoping for--I shall seek out
Wanda at once, and look after her. I do not know whether it is my duty
or not. But it is my inclination; and I am much too old to put my duty
before my inclination. So, if anything happens, and there follows that
confusion which you and I have seen once or twice before, where things
are stirring and dynasties are crumbling in the streets--when friends
and foes are seeking each other in vain--you need not seek me or think
about our friends in Warsaw. You need only think of yourself, remember
that. I shall have eloped--with Wanda."

And he finished with an odd laugh, that had a tender ring in it.

"Bukaty and I," he went on, after a pause, "do not talk of these things
together. But we have come to an understanding on that point. And when
the first flurry is over and we come to the top for a breath of air, you
have only to wire to my address in Paris to tell me where you are--and
I will tell you where--we are. We are old birds at this sport--you and
I--and we know how to take care of ourselves."

They were now in the outskirts of the town, among the wide and ill-paved
streets where tall houses are springing up on the site of the huts once
occupied by the Jews who are now quartered in the neighborhood of the
Nowiniarska market-place. For the chosen people must needs live near
a market-place, and within hearing of the chink of small coin. In the
cities of eastern Europe that have a Jews' quarter there is a barrier
erected between the daily lives of the two races, though no more than a
narrow st