ittle turn."

He led the way round the building to the rear of the southwest tower.
There was a little grove of jasmine trees just beneath it, that made the
air overpoweringly sweet, but there were no lights on this side, as the
garages, stables, vegetable gardens, and servants' quarters would have
destroyed the picture.

Spaulding glanced about sharply, but there was not even a strolling
couple, and even the moon was shining on the other side of the heavy mass
of buildings.

"Now, listen," he said. "You see this window?"--he indicated one directly
over their heads. "At exactly one o'clock, when everybody is flocking to
the supper tables on the terraces, I expect some one to lean out of that
window and talk to some one who will be waiting just below. There may be
no talk, but I think there will be, and I want you to listen to every
word of it without so much as drawing a long breath, no matter what is
said, until I grab your elbow--like this--then I want you to put up your
hand in a hurry while I'm also attendin' to business.

"That's all I'll say now. But by the time a few words have been said,
later, I guess you'll be on.

"Now, we must resign ourselves to a long wait without a smoke and to
keeping perfectly still. I dared not risk comin' any later for fear the
others might be beforehand, too."

Ruyler ground his teeth. He felt ridiculous and humiliated. It was no
compensation that he was holding up the wall of a stucco Moorish palace
and that some three hundred masked people in fancy dress were within
earshot... or did the way he was togged out make him feel all the more
absurd? The whole thing was beastly un-American....

But, was it, after all? If he and Helene had been here together to-night,
not married and harrowed, but engaged and quick with romance, would he
have thought it absurd to conspire and maneuver to separate her from the
crowd and snatch a few moments of heavenly solitude? Would he have
despised himself for suffering torments if she flouted him or for wanting
to murder any man who balked him?

Love, and all the passions, creative and destructive, it engendered, all
the sentiments and follies and crimes, to say nothing of ambition and
greed and the lust to kill in war--these were instincts and traits that
appeared in mankind generation after generation, in every corner
civilized and savage of the globe. The world changed somewhat in form
during its progress, but never in substance.

And myst