That clinched her success. She might have chanted "Old King Cole" and reaped a houseful of applause. As it was, she turned faery child and led them all forth to the Land of Faery--a world that neighbored so close to the real with her that long ago she had acquired the habit of carrying a good bit of it about with her wherever she went. It was small wonder, therefore, that, at the end of the evening, when she fixed upon a certain young man in the audience--a man with a persevering mustache, an esthetic face, and a melancholy, myopic squint--and told the last tale to him direct, that he felt called upon to go to her as she came down the steps into the ball-room and express his abject, worshipful admiration. "That's all right," Patsy cut him short, "but--but--it would sound so much nicer outside, somewhere in the moonlight--away from everybody. Wouldn't it, now?" This sudden amending of matter-of-factness with arch coquetry would have sounded highly amusing to ears less self-atuned than the erstwhile wearer of the Balmacaan. But he heard in it only the flattering tribute to a man chosen of men; and the hand that reached for Patsy's was almost masterful. "Oh, would you really?" he asked, and he almost broke his melancholy with a smile. "It must be my clothes," was her mental comment as he led her away; "they've gone to my own head; it's not altogether strange they've touched his a bit. But for a man who's forged his father's name and lost the girl he loved and then plunged into mortal despair, he's convalescing terribly fast." They had reached a quiet corner of the veranda. Patsy dropped into a chair, while her companion leaned against a near-by railing and looked down at her with something very like a soulful expression. "I might have known all along," Patsy was thinking, "that a back like that would have a front like this. Sure, ye couldn't get a real man to dress in knee-length petticoats." And then, to settle all doubts, she faced him with grim determination. "I let you bring me here because I had something to say to you. But first of all, did you come down here to-night on that five-something train from New York?" The man nodded. "Did you get to the train by a Madison Avenue car, taken from the corner of Seventy-seventh Street, maybe?" "Why, how did you know?" The melancholy was giving place to rather pleased curiosity. "How do I know!" Patsy glared at him. "I know because I've followed you every inch of the way--followed you to tell you I believed in you--you--you!" and her voice broke with a groan. "Oh, I say, that was awfully good of you." This time the smile had right of way, and such a flattered, self-conscious smile as it was! "You know everybody takes me rather as a joke." "Joke!" Patsy's eyes blazed. "Well, you're the most serious, impossible joke I ever met this side of London. Why, a person would have to dynamite his sense of humor to appreciate you."