"Suffering cats!" exclaimed Peaches. "No wonder you don't want to stop for any of this piker stuff." Then she turned to the elevator boy, who still lingered, seemingly in a state of semihypnosis. "Thanks for the paper, captain," she said. "Keep that dollar you owe me for a tip!" And then she slid her arm around my neck and strolled down the corridor with me, while the youth, with a parting grin, at length perceived the buzzing of the indicator, and vanished into his elevator contraption, not having uttered a single word since my advent. "I had him try to find me a San Francisco paper," Peaches explained as we returned to our royal apartments. "I get so sick of these Frenchy ones that I can't read, and of the London ones that have only news which could never have been fresh to me. I wanted to see a good comic sheet. Gee! How we used to rush for 'em out on the ranch. When Bill Hovey's mule team came into sight over Bear Ridge Dick and I used to commence matching for who'd open the bag. And generally we'd look at the comics together. Don't you love Krazy-Kat?" I shook my head slowly, more in despair at her simplicity than as the negative she took the gesture for. "Well, you wouldn't, no, nor Buster Brown, either, I suppose. But we didn't have any volumes of Webster or any such light stuff on the ranch, and had to take what we could get." "You have a newspaper of some sort, I see," I replied, feeling it useless to explain that I preferred Byron to Webster, and not feeling in the least convinced that Peaches knew of the existence of Daniel as well as of Noah. She pulled out a copy of the Paris _Herald_ from under her arm. "Not from the coast," she said, "but at least it's printed in American. The boy was a nice kid. He comes from Texas. He showed me a peach of a trick, and I was showing him a new Canfield when you breezed in with something really big. Hello! Here's something about Mr. Markheim!" She had been scanning the front page of the paper as she talked, and now she fell silent for a moment as she read. "Who is Mr. Markheim?" I inquired. "Not Sebastian Markheim, the great banker?" "Yeah!" said Peaches assentingly. "But it's nothing much. He's bought another picture, that's all. And paid the price of a couple of first-class orange-groves for it." "Why, Alicia Pegg!" I exclaimed. "What an extraordinary young female you are! Sebastian Markheim is one of the greatest collectors of antique paintings in the world. He is an authority on the subject. How do you come to know him?" "He came to know us!" she averred cheerfully. "Bought a ranch near our home outfit, and came over to get some pointers from pa. We see him a lot whenever he's in California." "How amazing!" I exclaimed. "Sebastian Markheim, the great millionaire! What manner of man is he, Alicia?" "Oh, he's a widower of about fifty or so," she said carelessly. "He's in love with me."