they mostly were, Beatrix and her English companion could hear the pathetic whimpers of the poor caged beasts in the Zoo in front of the house, and the raucous cries of the Semitic-looking parrots above the ceaseless cantata of motor traffic.

The morning after her lucky escape from York's studio, Beatrix slept late. Mrs. Lester Keene had breakfasted alone with the Times, saving Town Topics for her final cup of coffee. She had heard her charge, whom she made no effort to manage, return comparatively early the night before, and could hardly contain her curiosity to know what had happened. It was obvious that something had taken place, because, as a rule, Beatrix came back anywhere between one and two from her visits to the portrait painter. From a sense of duty and a fear of losing her comfortable position, Mrs. Lester Keene forced herself to remain awake on these occasions, sitting over a novel in a Jaeger dressing-gown or writing a long, rambling letter to a friend in London, in which, with tearful pride in her former independence, she wallowed in reminiscence.

Mrs. Lester Keene was the widow of a man of excellent family who had devoted all the best years of his life to the easy and too-well-paid pursuit of winding and unwinding "red tape" in a government office in London. He had died of it before he could retire to a stucco house at Brighton on a pension, and Amelia Keene had found herself in the tragic position of being alone in the world in the middle forties with nothing to bless herself with but an aged pomeranian, her undisputed respectability and the small sum paid to her on her husband's life policy. This, with the laudable and optimistic idea of placing herself forever out of the reach of the lean hand of penury, she had entrusted to the care of a glib city shark whom she had met in a boarding-house and who guaranteed that he would get her in on the ground floor of a new company exploiting the Eldorado Copper Mine and bring her in a regular three hundred and fifty-five per cent. on her capital. With this neat sum and others, however, the expert philanthropist with the waxed moustache and white spats paid his first-class fare to the Argentine and set up a matrimonial bureau for temperamental South Americans. Poor Amelia Keene sold her modest jewels and applied for work at the Employment Agency for Impoverished Gentlewomen, in George Street, Hanover Square.

It so happened that Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke were in London at that time and in need of a refined companion for their only daughter. Mrs. Lester Keene was one of the several dozen applicants and had the great good fortune to secure the much coveted post owing to the fact that her hair was grey, her complexion her own and her accent irreproachably Kensington. As Mrs. Vanderdyke intended to be the only made-up woman in any of her numerous houses, the other applicants were naturally turned down.

Like most English people the new companion had never been farther away from her native land than Boulogne. She thrilled with excitement, fright and the spirit of adventure when she joined the Vanderdyke entourage on board the Olympic. To be five or six days at sea was in itself an almost unbelievable exploit, full of hidden dangers and obvious terrors. The mere thought of shipwreck and the possibility of floating for days on a raft, in perhaps most unconventional attire, appalled her. But the thing that filled her nightly dreams with phantasmagoria was the knowledge that she was, God and the elements willing, to live in the United States,—a great wild country in which, she had been led to believe, men shot each other in the fashionable restaurants, broncho busters galloped madly along the principal streets of the big cities and lassoed helpless virgins, murderers in masks held up trains, black men were hanged to lamp-posts, as a matter of course, and comic creatures with large feet hammered people on the head with mallets. She had arrived at this point of view from several visits to the moving picture theatres in London, where American films do much to prejudice untravelled Europeans against the United States. Her astonishment when finally she arrived in New York and found herself in what she described to her friends at home as the Vanderdyke Palace, was almost childish.

In no sense of the word was she a companion to Beatrix. Her narrow and insular point of view, her characteristic English method of clinging to shibboleths and rococo ideas, and her complete and triumphant ignorance of all fundamental things made her, to Beatrix, more of a curiosity, like an early Victorian stuffed canary in a glass case, than a useful and helpful person. Beatrix had been born sophisticated. As a child and a young girl her arresting and palpable beauty had made her an irresistible mark for boys and young men, and one or two only of her early episodes, nearly all of which began well enough but ended in sometimes very rough attempts at seduction, would have crowded out of Mrs. Lester Keene's whole humdrum, drone-like life every incident that she could recall. Beatrix at once became her companion's guide, philosopher, friend and guardian, and derived constant amusement from the little garrulous, plump, hen-like woman, who knew no more about life than the average dramatist knows about people, and who, though completely dazzled by the hard, almost casual magnificence of her present surroundings, delighted to live in the past, telling long and pointless stories of "my house in Clanricarde Gardens, you know," "Mrs. Billings, my cook," "The summer when Algernon and I took the Edward Jones's house at Bognor," "My drawing-room was always crowded every second and fourth Thursday, quite a Salon, in fact," and so on, in a glorification of the commonplace that was as pathetic as it was tiresome.

Before Mrs. Keene had waded through the first few pages of her favorite weekly paper, a maid disturbed her. "Miss Vanderdyke would be glad to see you," she said, conveying the kindly but nevertheless royal command with full appreciation.

Mrs. Lester Keene was glad to obey. Even if dear Beatrix had nothing exciting to tell her, she had a very curious piece of news to impart to dear Beatrix. So she gathered herself together, rather in the same way as her prototype, the barnyard hen rising from a bath of sun-baked earth, and made her way along a wide passage hung with the priceless old prints which had overflowed from the lower rooms, to the bedroom of the daughter of the house.

Beatrix was sitting on the edge of a four-post bed, in a pink, transparent nightgown, her little feet in heelless slippers. On a table at her elbow there was a just placed breakfast tray and a new copy of Town and Country. Fresh from sleep, with her fair hair all about her shoulders, Beatrix, the one alive and exquisite thing in that too-large, too-lofty, pompous room, looked like a single rosebud in a geometrically designed garden.

"Come along, Brownie," she said, stretching herself with catlike grace, "and talk to me while I feed."

"You'll put something on, dear, won't you?"

"No, dear Brownie, I won't. No one can spy into the room and there isn't a single portrait of a man on the walls. So please don't fuss. It's far too hot for a dressing-gown and in my case why should I hide my charms from you?" She laughed at her wholly justified conceit, gave herself a very friendly nod in a pier-glass in the distance and poured out a cup of coffee.

Amelia Keene could never at any time, even in her isolated spinster days in the heart of the country, have brought herself to wear such an