account of your coming out in it, and a picture of you, and I wrote East to the photographer for the original. It knocked about the West for three months and then reached me at Laredo, on the border between Texas and Mexico, and I have had it with me ever since." 

 Miss Langham looked at Clay for a moment in silent dismay and with a perplexed smile. 

 "Where is it now?" she asked at last. 

 "In my trunk at the hotel." 

 "Oh," she said, slowly. She was still in doubt as to how to treat this act of unconventionality.  "Not in your watch?" she said, to cover up the pause.  "That would have been more in keeping with the rest of the story." 

 The young man smiled grimly, and pulling out his watch pried back the lid and turned it to her so that she could see a photograph inside. The face in the watch was that of a young girl in the dress of a fashion of several years ago. It was a lovely, frank face, looking out of the picture into the world kindly and questioningly, and without fear. 

 "Was I once like that?" she said, lightly.  "Well, go on." 

 "Well," he said, with a little sigh of relief, "I became greatly interested in Miss Alice Langham, and in her comings out and goings in, and in her gowns. Thanks to our having a press in the States that makes a specialty of personalities, I was able to follow you pretty closely, for, wherever I go, I have my papers sent after me. I can get along without a compass or a medicine-chest, but I can't do without the newspapers and the magazines. There was a time when I thought you were going to marry that Austrian chap, and I didn't approve of that. I knew things about him in Vienna. And then I read of your engagement to others—well—several others; some of them I thought worthy, and others not.  Once I even thought of writing you about it, and once I saw you in Paris. You were passing on a coach. The man with me told me it was you, and I wanted to follow the coach in a fiacre, but he said he knew at what hotel you were stopping, and so I let you go, but you were not at that hotel, or at any other—at least, I couldn't find you." 

 "What would you have done—?" asked Miss Langham.  "Never mind," she interrupted, "go on." 

 "Well, that's all," said Clay, smiling.  "That's all, at least, that concerns you. That is the romance of this poor young man." 

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