“You don’t seem to need any introduction to my niece, Lord Battleford,” he said, loftily, while his face flushed with turkey-cock rage, “and I beg to inform you that I think it a deuced ungentlemanlike thing on your part to compromise a girl with clandestine meetings and flirtations in the absence of her family, and I tell you plainly the whole thing has got to stop.” “Not so fast, if you please, Mr. Hay,” said my sailor, laughing. “I have won a wife who likes me for what I _am_ irrespective of what I _have_, and I hope you and Mrs. Russell are not going to spoil our romance by refusing your consent. Speak up, Kate,” he said, turning to me; “tell these discreet people that I am something better than a title--a man you have learned to love.” And so I had to make a second confession of the state of my heart, and mamma succumbed in two minutes to Battleford’s charms--or those of his title--but I heard Uncle Barton still scolding as he helped her up the sand dune. “Oh, yes, he’ll make a she-earl of Kate--countess, I mean--but he’ll take her away from us, and I fancy you will yet regret the day you trusted her out of your sight, when the ocean lies between us and our little girl.” But she didn’t! For in giving me to Battleford she not only had me often with her, but gained the dearest of sons. MRS. EVREMOND By Mrs. John Van Vorst & Marie Van Vorst [Illustration] When Mrs. Evremond found herself actually in her carriage it seemed to her that it would never go fast enough, although Heaven knows she was indifferent to the speed of her vehicles as a rule, there being no reason why she should hasten--no place she especially cared to arrive at, no excitement or element of it in her quiet life. But this afternoon she was conscious of every rotation of the wheels. When the Arc de Triomphe had been passed and in and out among automobiles and tramways her little yellow-wheeled brougham crossed the Etoile and began the descent, suddenly, with the inconsequence marking a woman’s emotions as clearly as it stamps her reasonings, Mrs. Evremond decided the coachman was driving at a ridiculous rate. After all, she hoped never to reach the Place de la Concorde--never to traverse the Pont Royal and leave for the Latin Quarter and the other side of the river--the _insouciant_ world of the Bois and American Paris. She had no desire to find the obscure street in which her husband had his studio--which street was, however, the direction she had given her footman, and it was toward No. 15 bis, Passage du Maine, that with such useless speed she was being driven. They reached and passed the Elysée Palace Hotel. Mrs. Evremond blew through the tube at her side, the brougham drew up to the curb, stopped and she got out.