jolly week?" I asked.

Miss Tabor's smile answered me. Then turning half away with a face grown suddenly and strangely bleak: "I think it was the best Christmas of my life," she said mechanically. And then with a sudden return to sunshine: "I suppose I see the professor starting on his learned pilgrimage. Is it Europe this summer, or the great libraries of America?"

She had twitted me before upon my lack of scholarly bearing which, as I had always explained, was but a mask to unsuspected profundity.

"Well,"—I began, deliberately groping for a decision among the tangled fates of the afternoon,[Pg 5] my doubtful steamer and my grudging plans, "to tell you the truth, Miss Tabor—"

[Pg 5]

She touched my arm and pointed out of the window. "Look," she said, "you haven't nearly time enough for that now. Do hurry—you mustn't take chances."

The platform was slipping by faster and faster, and with it sobriety and common sense and the wisdom of the beaten path. On the other hand lay the comedy of the present and that flouting of one's own arrangements which is the last word of freedom. I glanced down at her ticket, where it lay face upward on the window-sill.

"To tell you the truth, Miss Tabor," I finished, "I am on my way to Stamford," and I settled back comfortably into my seat.

Miss Tabor regarded me tolerantly, with the air of a collector examining a doubtful specimen: one eyebrow a trifle raised, and an adorable twist at the corners of her mouth. As for me, I tried to look innocently unconcerned. It may be possible to do this; but no one is ever conscious of success at the time.

"I'm going there myself," she said suddenly. "Isn't this a coincidence?"[Pg 6]

[Pg 6]

"Easily that. Let me amend the word and call it a dispensation. But appearances are against you. You ought to be going to a lawn party—in a dog-cart."

"I wonder where you ought to be going," she mused. "Probably to the British museum to dig up a lot of dead authors that everybody ought to know about and nobody reads."

This was altogether too near the truth. "I didn't know you lived in Stamford," I said. "You appeared last Christmas in a character of the daughter of Gotham. 

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