ra.

Emmy laughed. "In your present mood you would find fault with an
archangel. Good-bye, darling, and take care of yourself."

She bore no malice, having a kind heart and being foolishly happy. When she
returned to the drawing-room the man took both her hands.

"Well, sweetheart?"

"My sister wanted to carry me off to Italy."

"What did you say?"

"Guess," said the girl, lifting starry eyes.

The man guessed, after the manner of men, and for a moment Emmy forgot
Zora, who went her own way in pursuit of happiness, heedless of the wisdom
of the wise and of the foolish.

CHAPTER II

For five months Zora wandered over the world--chiefly Italy--without an
experience which might be called an adventure. When the Literary Man from
London crossed her mind she laughed him to scorn for a prophetic popinjay.
She had broken no man's heart, and her own was whole. The tribes of Crim
Tartary had exhibited no signs of worry and had left her unmolested. She
had furthermore taken rapturous delight in cathedrals, expensive
restaurants, and the set pieces of fashionable scenery. Rattenden had not a
prophetic leg to stand on.

Yet she longed for the unattainable--for the elusive something of which
these felicities were but symbols. Now the wanderer with a haunting sense
of the Beyond, but without the true vagabond's divine gift of piercing the
veil, can only follow the obvious; and there are seasons when the obvious
fails to satisfy. When such a mood overcame her mistress, Turner railed at
the upsetting quality of foreign food, and presented bicarbonate of soda.
She arrived by a different path at the unsatisfactory nature of the
obvious. Sometimes, too, the pleasant acquaintances of travel were lacking,
and loneliness upset the nice balance of Zora's nerves. Then, more than
ever, did she pine for the Beyond.

Yet youth, receptivity, imagination kept her buoyant. Hope lured her on
with renewed promises from city to city. At last, on her homeward journey,
he whispered the magic name of Monte Carlo, and her heart was aflutter in
anticipation of wonderland.

She stood bewildered, lonely, and dismayed in the first row behind the
chairs, fingering an empty purse. She had been in the rooms ten minutes,
and she had lost twenty louis. Her last coup had been successful, but a
bland old lady, with the white hair and waxen face of sainted motherhood,
had swept up her winnings so unconcernedly that Zora's brain began to swim.
As