"She will tell you when you have been here two months about her family," remarked Miss Clover Green. "It's vrai aristocracy, way back, but during the Revolution strange marriages had to be made. Her great grandmother took the gardener's son, temporarily, and hence the name. Then when you know her a month better you will hear about the uncle, a member of the Conseil d'État under the last Napoleon. By spring time you will be asked out to Granville-that's a little bit of a place in the country which she has managed to buy."

1 have been through it all?" "Oh, yes. Auntie and I have been here off and on three years. You see, I model; everyone has to do something, and I am in Durand's atelier in the morning. We used to have an apatment beyond the Luxembourg, but stock went down and I bought a palace in Venice it doesn't pay

buying palaces in Venice; one ends in a pension."

"You know your neighbors on your floor?" she went on gently, determined to do the best for her countryman. "There's the doctor across the table-he can understand a little English-he's very clever, only twenty-two and through with all his studies. He is on his way home

He is sputtering French at you." There was a quiet-faced chap on the other side, an Englishman, Ransom took him to be: he looked like a solid intelligence in the crowd of emotions. Ransom was glad to find him a neighbor on the third floor, and they came to take refuge in one another. He was at the Polytechnique, a few doors away, and he was fighting against the charms of Clover Green. Ransom was willing to bet on the charms until a complication rose. For some time the young Englishman said nothing to his

neighbor concerning the American girl, an international delicacy, perhaps, preventing him.

Another actor seemed to hover about, and soon an occasion came for Ransom to feel his presence. Late one evening the two men had turned into their disreputable street; an unusual sight caught their notice -a voiture at the door of the passage to the court-yard. It always suggested mystery, delights, to see a cab pulled up at the door of this modest retreat. As they neared the passage the carriage-door opened, so that by the light of the lamp two faces could be seen one was Clover Green's fast enough, peeping out from the end of a voluminous wrap; the other, Ransom had seen it somewhere he felt-a sallow, grinning face, with heavy mustaches, an impression of oil oozing from every pore.

His companion, Ransom noted, had glanced at the same time, but swiftly turned

Ransom whistled.

"Who the devil is he?"

"You will see him about the house at odd times, late at night like this, coming home from the theatre or opera, or driving off for dinner. That's his own voiture, chartered I suppose. Whenever you see it hanging around you may know that he is with Miss Green, somewhere about the premises."

"And Auntie '-what has she to say?" "Hecomes from the same city, St. Louis. But they picked him up in Vienna two years ago, in that easy fashion, pardon me, your country people have of acquiring acquaintances whom they convert into friends. Mrs. Sollow told me how much he had done for Miss Clover-' formed' her was her word-in these two years. Developed her tastes and given her the present interest of modelling, which employs her time here in Paris."

"Then," the American remarked, "he is engaged to her, or about to be."

The Englishman's voice took an unnatural key, which showed that he wished to be reserved.

"That it is impossible to say."

"Why don't you ask her?" Ransom remarked, flippantly.

"Because Miss Green is not the person one asks such questions of."

Ransom's mind kept turning over that face and trying to fit a name and place to it. "You know his name?"

"He calls himself P. Bertram ClarkeI met him once."

That seemed to give little further light. What American has not an extensive acquaintance among the Clarkes?

"Can you tell me," he said at last, in his slightly ponderous British fashion, "why they all come over here to dabble in art or to study languages or to travel, all your American young women, with a little money and good morals. One finds them at every pension table in Europe. Is there nothing in your country to satisfy them?"

Come and see," the other replied. "They rise generally from a certain stratum of our civilization, such young women as Miss Clover Green-and their lives over there are pretty thin, or likely to be."

"Here they are game for any adventurer, big or little, in proportion to their

Ransom glanced across the angle of the garden to the windows of Mrs. Sollow's rooms. In the faint light of a little lamp sat Clover Green, looking out into the cool, damp night. She had her long wrap still about her, thrown back from her head. He could almost feel the solemnity of her face. What facts of life was she so grimly revolving to herself when she should have been abed like other healthy young Clovers?

the Louvre. She walked the long galleries, handled the place, as Ransom put it, as if it were the back pasture of her father's farm, or the vacant lot she had known from childhood.

She stopped lovingly before a Franz Hals.

"What a dash and go! If one could do that! It's awfully nice, isn't it?" "And if one can't do that, is there nothing else to make up?"

"Yes, there is one thing," the girl re

III

THE pension ranked them as follows: The "unknown possibility" with an easy lead over all other competitors in Mademoiselle Clover's favor; then, by right of respect and old fellowship, the young Englishman; after him the new American, Ransom-Madame Cuano's preference ; and, at the end, hopelessly handicapped, a young Bulgarian. Ransom, it was soon conceded, played the most assiduous game. Brown was occupied with his work at the Polytechnique; Ransom, on the other hand, who was nominally on the search for a manuscript in the National Library, found plenty of spare moments in the morning to jaser with his fellow-countrywoman.

He discovered that his way to the rue Richelieu led by Durand's atelier across the Luxembourg gardens. He would dawdle about the old court-yard until Miss Green appeared, then saunter with her down the Pantheon hill, dodging the groups of impertinent students. The powderish mist of a Paris morning enveloped the hard walls of the Pantheon and stole among the Luxembourg trees. Sometimes they would linger in the yellowed grassplots of the old garden watching the fantastic nurses as they brought their fat little charges out for the morning.

At the corner of the rue Vaugirard Ransom would say adieu and slip into the crowd streaming riverward. He would sniff the familiar odors of each dark street, and wonder why he was always left on the outside of this young woman's mind.

Once he had induced her to deviate
VOL. XXII.-78

"And that?" Ransom queried, earnestly. She took her loving glance from the Franz Hals, and swept by her companion indifferently, unconsciously drawing her wrap closer.

"Could no one give you that?" he pursued, venturesomely.

Ransom knew

"Perhaps someone." that he was out of the play, as much as he had been when he first set eyes on her that warm November afternoon. They smiled enigmatically at one another, and turned to the next picture.

"So it's P. Bertram Clarke," mused Ransom, and though a little sore over his warning, he was determined to know more.

In

"I have it," he exclaimed the next morning as he was sipping his coffee. a flash of matutinal inspiration the face and the name came back. He is Paul B. Clarke, who was at Yale for two years."

That was ten years back; Ransom had known him as every one in New Haven did-a little. He had swaggered there on the vague report of being the iron king Clarke's near relative and heir. His ratlike activity had pushed him into prominence in a thousand little inferior ways. Then he did not appear at New Haven one autumn, and some years later, when Ransom happened to be in St. Louis, he had had the curiosity to inquire about him. Paul B. Clarke was no relative of the millionaire Hiram Clarke, he had found out, merely a young fellow the "iron king" had interested himself in. There had been some row between them about money matters; nothing that came to the surface as a scandal, and the young fellow had become a lawyer in Chicago. Voilà tout! But suggestive it seemed to Ransom.