as it was! “You know everybody takes me rather as a joke.”

“Joke!” Patsy’s eyes blazed. “Well, you’re the most serious, impossible joke I ever met this side of London. Why, a person would have to dynamite his sense of humor to appreciate you.”

“I don’t think I understand.” He felt about in his waistcoat pocket and drew forth a monocle, which he adjusted carefully. “Would you mind saying that again?”

Patsy’s hands dropped helplessly to her lap. “I couldn’t—only, after a woman has trailed a man she doesn’t know across a country she doesn’t know to a place she doesn’t know—and without a wardrobe trunk, a letter of credit, or a maid, just to tell him she believes in him, he becomes the most tragically serious thing that ever happened to her in all her life.”

“Oh, I say, I always thought they were pretty good; but I never thought any one would appreciate my poetry like that.”