dialect. But she had a habit of taking on the accent and color of her environments. She had not been in England a month before she spoke Piccadilly almost impeccably. She had caught French and German intonations with equal speed and had picked up music by ear with the same amazing facility in the days when certain kinds of music were her livelihood.

In one respect her Englishness of accent was less an imitation or an affectation than a certain form of politeness and modesty. When an Englishwoman said, “Cahn’t you?” it seemed tactless to answer, “No, I cann’t.” To respond to “Good mawning” with “Good morrning” had the effect of a contradiction or a correction. She had none of the shibboleth spirit that leads certain people to die or slay for a pronunciation. The pronunciation of the people she was talking to was good enough for her. She conformed also because she hated to see people listening less to what she said than to the Yankee way she said it.

This man Davidge had a superb brow and a look of success, but he bored her before he reached her. She made ready for flight to some other group. Then he startled her––by being startled as he caught sight of her. When Lady Webling transmitted him with a murmur of his name and a tender, “My daughter,” Davidge stopped short and mumbled:

“I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you before, somewhere, haven’t I?”

Marie Louise snubbed him flatly. “I think not.”

He took the slap with a smile. “Did I hear Lady Webling call you her daughter?”

Marie Louise did not explain, but answered, curtly, “Yes,” with the aristocratic English parsimony that makes it almost “Yis.”

“Then you’re right and I’m wrong. I beg your pardon.”

“Daon’t mention it,” said Marie Louise, and drew closer to Lady Webling and the oncoming guest. She had the 13 decency to reproach herself for being beastly to the stranger, but his name slipped at once through the sieve of her memory.

Destiny is the grandiose title we give to the grand total of a long column of accidents when we stop to tot up the figures. So we wait till that strange sum of accidents which we call a baby is added up into a living child of determined sex before we fasten a name that changes an it to a him or a her.

The accidents that result in a love-affair, too, we look back on and outline into a definite road, and we call that Fate. We are great for giving names to selected fragments of the chaos of life.

In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what really happened––which was, that she retained no impression of him at all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her.

He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams––a girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of instruments––xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions, cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and the strange cry she put into her music.

When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too, in four voices––in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They called her “Mamise, the Quartet in One.”

Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage, where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment, “I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these days––or nights, Miss Mamise.”

She had grumbled, “Much ubbliged!” and returned to the ape, while Davidge slunk away, ashamed.

He had not forgotten that name, though the public had. He had never seen “Mamise” in the electric lights. He had never found the name in any dictionary. He had supposed her to be a foreigner––Spanish, Polish, Czech, French, or something. He had not been able to judge her nationality from the two gruff words, but he had often wondered what had happened to her. She might have been killed in a train wreck or been married to the ape-trainer or gone to some other horrible conclusion. He had pretty well buried her among his forgotten admirations and torments, when lo and behold! she emerged from a crowd of peeresses and plutocrats in London.

He had sprung toward her with a wild look of recognition before he had had time to think it over. He had been rebuffed by a cold glance and then by an English intonation and a fashionable phrase. He decided that his memory had made a fool of him, and he stood off, humble and confused.

But his eyes quarreled with his ears, and kept telling him that this tall beauty who ignored him so perfectly, so haughtily, was really his lost Mamise.

If men would trust their intuitions oftener they would not go wrong so often, perhaps, since their best reasoning is only guesswork, after all. It was not going to be destiny that brought Davidge and Marie Louise together again so much as the man’s hatred of leaving anything unfinished––even 15 a dream or a vague desire. There was no shaking Davidge off a thing he determined on except as you shake off a snapping-turtle, by severing its body from its head.

A little later Sir Joseph sought the man out and treated him respectfully, and Marie Louise knew he must be somebody. She found him staring at her over Sir Joseph’s shoulder and puzzling about her. And this made her wretchedly uncomfortable, for perhaps, after all, she fretted, he had indeed met her somewhere before, somewhere in one of those odious strata she had passed through on her way up to the estate of being called daughter by Lady Webling.

She forgot her misgivings and was restored to equanimity by the incursion of Polly Widdicombe and her husband. Polly was one of the best-dressed women in the world. Her husband had the look of the husband of the best-dressed woman in the world. Polly had a wiry voice, and made no effort to soften it, but she was tremendously smart. She giggled all the time and set people off in her vicinity, though her talk was rarely witty on its own account.

Laughter rippled all through her life. She talked of her griefs in a plucky, riant way, making eternal fun of herself as a giddy fool. She carried a delightful jocundity wherever she went. She was aristocratic, too, in the postgraduate degree of being careless, reckless, superior even to good manners. She had a good heart and amiable feelings; these made manners enough.

She had lineage as well, for her all-American family ran straight back into the sixteen hundreds, which