He was looking at me when he said it, and he looked a good deal more than he said.

Then he went away, and poor Pop died.

Of course I couldn't write and tell him, and I suppose he was too proud to write before he'd done what he undertook to do, and I, like most girl-fools in the same place would have done, thought that he'd given the whole thing up and just looked upon the trip as a sort of interlude in globe-trotting, and thought no more about Pop's ideas and inventions than he did about his daughter." "Very natural, of course," said Mrs.Van Stuyler, somewhat mollified by the subdued passion which Zaidie had managed to put into her commonplace words; "and so as you thought he had forgotten you and was finding a wife in his own country, and a possible husband came over from that same country with a coronet----" "That'll do, Mrs.Van, thank you," interrupted Miss Zaidie, bringing her daintily-shod foot down on the deck this time with an unmistakable stamp.

"We'll consider that incident closed if you please.

It was a miserable, mean, sordid business altogether; I am utterly, hopelessly ashamed of it and myself too.