The white servants had become good friends, despite the natural disdain that the trained English expert feels for the unpolished American domestic. Antipathies were overlooked in the eager strife for companionship; the fact that one of Mrs. Browne's maids was of Irish extraction and the other a rosy Swede may have had something to do with their admission into the exclusive set below stairs, but that is outside the question. If the Suffolk maids felt any hesitancy about accepting the hybrid combination as their equals, it was never manifested by word or deed. Even the astute Antoine, who had lived long in the boulevards of Paris, and who therefore knew an American when he saw one at any distance or at any price, evinced no uncertainty in proclaiming them Americans. Miss Pelham, the stenographer from West Twenty-third Street, might have been included in the circle from the first had not her dignity stood in the way. For six days she held resolutely aloof from everything except her notebook and her machine, but her stock of novels beginning to run low, and the prospect of being bored to extinction for six months to come looming up before her, she concluded to wave the olive branch in the face of social ostracism, assuming a genial attitude of condescension, which was graciously overlooked by the others. As she afterward said, there is no telling how low she might have sunk, had it not entered her head one day to set her cap for the unsuspecting Mr. Saunders. She had learned, in the wisdom of her sex, that he was fancy free. Mr. Saunders, fully warned against the American typewriter girl as a class, having read the most shocking jokes at her expense in the comic papers, was rather shy at the outset, but Britt gallantly came to Miss Pelham's defence and ultimate rescue by emphatically assuring Saunders that she was a perfect lady, guaranteed to cause uneasiness to no man's wife. "But I have no wife," quickly protested Saunders, turning a dull red. "The devil!" exclaimed Britt, apparently much upset by the revelation. But of this more anon. * * * * * Browne conducted the two young women across the drawbridge and to the sunlit edge of the terrace, where two servants awaited them with parasols. "Isn't it extraordinary, the trouble one is willing to take for the merest glimpse of a man?" sighed Lady Agnes. "At home we try to avoid them." "Indeed?" said pretty Mrs. Browne, with a slight touch of irony. It was the first sign of the gentle warfare which their wits were to wage. "There he is! See him?" almost whispered Browne, as if the solitary, motionless figure at the foot of the avenue was likely to hear his voice and be frightened away.