"I shall disappoint you. Ijima and I between us have stuck me together like a cracked plate. And it is not well to publish our troubles to the world. If I called the village doctor he would kill his horse circulating the mysterious tidings. Are you satisfied?" "Quite so. You're a man after my own heart, Donovan." We had reached the dining-room and stood by our chairs. "I should like," he said, taking up his cocktail glass, "to propose a truce between us--" "In the matter of a certain lady?" "Even so! On the honor of a fool," he said, and touched his glass to his lips. "And may the best man win," he added, putting down the glass unemptied. He was one of those comfortable people with whom it is possible to sit in silence; but after intervals in which we found nothing to say he would, with exaggerated gravity, make some utterly inane remark. To-night his mind was more agile than ever, his thoughts leaping nimbly from crag to crag, like a mountain goat. He had traveled widely and knew the ways of many cities; and of American political characters, whose names were but vaguely known to me, he discoursed with delightful intimacy; then his mind danced away to a tour he had once made with a company of acrobats whose baggage he had released from the grasping hands of a rural sheriff. "What," he asked presently, "is as sad as being deceived in a person you have admired and trusted? I knew a fellow who was professor of something in a blooming college, and who was so poor that he had to coach delinquent preps in summer-time instead of getting a vacation. I had every confidence in that fellow. I thought he was all right, and so I took him up into Maine with me--just the two of us--and hired an Indian to run our camp, and everything pointed to plus. Well, I always get stung when I try to be good." He placed his knife and fork carefully across his plate and sighed deeply. "What was the matter? Did he bore you with philosophy?" "No such luck. That man was weak-minded on the subject of domesticating prairie-dogs. You may shoot me if that isn't the fact. There he was, a prize-winner and a fellow of his university, and a fine scholar who edited Greek text-books, with that thing on his mind. He held that the daily example of the happy home life of the prairie-dog would tend to ennoble all mankind and brighten up our family altars. Think of being lost in the woods with a man with such an idea, and of having to sleep under the same blanket with him! It rained most of the time so we had to sit in the tent, and he never let up. He got so bad that he would wake me up in the night to talk prairie-dog." "It must have been trying," I agreed. "What was your solution, Buttons?"