"And----" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp. "And--oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see." Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manoeuvre. "Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her glasses, "how do you know?" "I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you." And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes. We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay. Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous mass of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege. The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again. CHAPTER V HE COMES