something. Have you a title?"

"I am called Princess."

"Can you beat that? Climb up a wall to see some A-rabs perform, and find a real, sure-enough princess, and likewise, if you don't mind my saying so, a pippin."

"I don't know what you mean," she said.

"A corker."

"Corker?"

"I mean that you're a good-looker—that it's no labor at all to gaze right at you. I didn't think they grew them so far from headquarters, but I see I'm wrong. You are certainly all right. Pardon me for saying this to you so soon after we meet, but I have learned that you will never break a woman's heart by telling her that she is a beaut."

Are you a real ingénue, or a kidder?

Kalora leaned back in her chair and laughed. She was beginning to comprehend the whimsical humor of the very unusual young man. His direct and playful manner of speech amused her, and also seemed to reassure her. And, when he seated himself within a few inches of her elbow, fanning himself with the little straw hat, and calmly inspecting the tiny landscape of the forbidden garden, she made no protest against his familiarity, although she knew that she was violating the most sacred rules laid down for her sex.

She reasoned thus with herself:

"To-day I have disgraced myself to the utmost, and, since I am utterly shamed, why not revel in my lawlessness?"

Besides, she wished to question this young man. Mrs. Plumston had said to her: "You are beautiful." No one else had ever intimated such a thing. In fact, for five years she had been taunted almost daily because of her lack of all physical charms. Perhaps she could learn the truth about herself by some adroit questioning of the young man from Pennsylvania.

"You have traveled a great deal?" she asked.

"Me and Baedeker and Cook wrote it," he replied; and then, seeing that she was puzzled, he said: "I have been to all of the places they keep open."

"You have seen many women in many countries?"

"I have. I couldn't help it, and I'm glad of it."

"Then you know what constitutes beauty?"

"Not always. What is sponge cake for me may be sawdust for somebody else. Say, I rode for an hour in a 'rickshaw at Nagoya to see the most beautiful girl in Japan and when we got to the teahouse they trotted out a little shrimp that looked as if she'd been dried over a barrel—you know, stood bent all the time, as if she was getting ready to jump. Her neck was no bigger than a gripman's wrist and she had a nose that stood right out from her face almost an eighth of an inch. Her eyes were set on the bias and she was painted more colors than a bandwagon. I said, 'If this is the champion geisha, take me back to the land of the chorus girl.' And in China! Listen! I caught a Chinese belle coming down the Queen's Road in Hong-Kong one day, and I ran up an alley. I have seen Parisian beauties that had a coat of white veneering over them an inch thick, and out here in this country I have seen so-called cracker-jacks that ought to be doing the mountain-of-flesh act in the Ringling side-show. So there you are!"

"But in your own country, and in the larger cities of the world, there must be some sort of standard. What are the requirements? What must a woman be, that all men would call her beautiful?"

"Well, Princess, that's a pretty hard proposition to dope out. Good looks can not be analyzed in a lab or worked out by algebra, because, I'm telling you, the one that may look awful lucky to me may strike somebody else as being fairly punk. Providence framed it up that way so as to give more girls a chance to land somebody. Still, there is one kind that makes a hit wherever people are bright enough to sit up and take notice. Now I suppose that any male being in his right senses would find it easy to look at a woman who was young enough and had eyes and hair and teeth and the other items, all doing team-work together, and then if she was trim and slender—"

"Should she be slender?" interrupted Kalora, leaning toward him.

"Sure. I don't mean the same width all the way up and down, like an art student, but trim and—Here, I'll show you. You will find the pictures of the most beautiful women in the world right here in the ads of a ten-cent magazine. Look them over and you will understand what I mean."

He turned page after page and showed her the tapering goddesses of the straight front, the tooth-powder, the camera, the breakfast-food, the massage-cream, and the hair-tonic.

"These are what you call beautiful women?" she asked.

"These are about the limit."

"Then in your country I would not be considered hideous, would I?"

"Hideous? Say, if you ever walked up Fifth Avenue you would block the traffic! And in the palm-garden at the Waldorf—why, you and the head waiter would own the place! Are you trying to string me by asking such questions? Are you a real ingénue, or a kidder?"

"I hardly know what you mean, but I assure you that here in Morovenia they laugh at me because I am not fat."

"This is a shine country, and you're in wrong, little girl," said Mr. Pike, in a kindly tone. "Why don't you duck?"

"Duck?"

"Leave here and hunt up some of the red spots on the map. You know what I mean—away to the bright lights! I don't like to knock your native land but, honestly, Morovenia is a bad boy. I've struck towns around here where you couldn't buy illustrated post-cards. They take in the sidewalks at nine o'clock every night. That orchestra down at the hotel handed me a new coon song last night—Bill Bailey! Can you beat that? As long as you stay here you are hooked up with a funeral."

Kalora, with wrinkled brow, had been striving to follow him in his figurative flights.

"Strange," she murmured. "You are the second person I have met to-day who advises me to go away—to the west."

"That's the tip!" he exclaimed with fervor. "Go west and when you start, keep on going. You come to America and bring along the papers to show that you're a real live princess and you'll own both sides of the street. We'll show you more real excitement in two weeks than you'll see around here if you live to be a hundred."

"I should like to go, but—Look! Hurry, please! You must go!"

She pointed, and young Mr. Pike turned to see two guards in baggy uniforms bearing down upon him, their eyes bulging with amazement.

"Shall I try to put up a bluff, or fight it out?" he asked, as he stood up to meet them.

"You can not explain," gasped Kalora. "Run! Run! They know you have no right here. This means going to prison—perhaps worse."

"Does it?" he asked, between his set teeth. "If those two brunettes get me, they'll have to go some."

When the two pounced upon him he made no resistance and they captured him. He stood between them, each of them clutching an arm and breathing heavily, not only from exertion, but also out of a sense of triumph.

VI

HE DEPARTS

And now, in order to give a key to the surprising performances of Alexander H. Pike, it will be necessary to call up certain biographical data.

When he was in the Hill School he won the pole vault, but later, in his real collegiate days, he never could come within two inches of 'varsity form, and therefore failed to make the track-team.

While attending the Institute of Technology he worked one whole autumn to perfect an offensive play which was to be used against "Buff" Rodigan, of the semi-professional athletic-club team. This play was known as "giving the shoulder," with the solar plexus as the point of attack. The purpose of the play was not to kill the opposing player, but to induce him to relinquish all interest in the