Today's Stichomancy for Peter O'Toole

rather haughty, we were fond of him. After all, it was his place to behave so. When a man is a born nobleman, you see----'

" 'Still, there must have been some catastrophe for Monsieur and Madame de Merret to part so violently?'

" 'I did not say there was any catastrophe, sir. I know nothing about it.'

" 'Indeed. Well, now, I am sure you know everything.'

" 'Well, sir, I will tell you the whole story.--When I saw Monsieur Regnault go up to see you, it struck me that he would speak to you about Madame de Merret as having to do with la Grande Breteche. That put it into my head to ask your advice, sir, seeming to me that you

La Grande Breteche

always came out in the end. The Dorringtons on the other hand came out very little; or else when they did they stayed - as was natural - for hours, during which periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls sometimes called at their hotel (to see if they had returned) as many as three times running. The gondola was for the ladies, as in Venice too there were "days," which Mrs. Moreen knew in their order an hour after she arrived. She immediately took one herself, to which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain occasion when Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark's - where, taking the best walks they had ever had and haunting a hundred churches, they spent a great deal of time - they saw the old lord turn up

fire, but, seemingly, saddened by the distance between us, perhaps by the hopelessness of reaching me."

"Poor fellow! When a man loves he becomes eminently stupid," said the marquise.

"Between every act he would slip into the corridor," continued the princess, smiling at her friend's epigrammatic remark. "Once or twice, either to see me or to make me see him, he looked through the glass sash of the box exactly opposite to mine. If I received a visit, I was certain to see him in the corridor close to my door, casting a furtive glance upon me. He had apparently learned to know the persons belonging to my circle; and he followed them when he saw them turning

awful gallant, cowpunchers are."

"Some of them may be," she differed. "If you want to know I'm just twenty-one."

He sawed industriously at his steak. "Y'u don't say! Just old enough to vote--like this steer was before they massacreed him."

She gave him one look, and thereafter punished him with silence.

They left Gimlet Butte early next morning and reached the Lazy D shortly after noon on the succeeding day. McWilliams understood perfectly that strenuous competition would inevitably ensue as soon as the Lazy D beheld the attraction he had brought into their midst. Nor did he need a phrenologist to tell him that Nora