"They are a wonderful race," Mr. Cloudwater remarked, "aren't they, Sabine. I never can understand why you should so persistently avoid them—they really have much more in common with ourselves than Latins."

"That is why perhaps—one likes contrasts—and French and Russians, or Germans, are far more intelligent. Every one to his taste!" and Mrs. Howard smiled.

The Englishman came out again in a few minutes, and sitting down lazily, as though he were alone upon the balcony terrace, he ordered some tea. Not the remotest scrap of interest in his surroundings or companions lit up his face. He might have been forty or forty-two, perhaps, but being so fair he looked a good deal younger, and had a peculiar distinction of his own.

"That is what I object to about them," Mrs. Howard remarked presently, "their abominable arrogance. Look at that man. It is just as though there was no one else on this balcony but himself—no one else exists for him!"

"Why, Sabine, you are severe! He looks to me to be a pretty considerably nice man—and he is only reading the paper as I have been doing myself," Mr. Cloudwater rejoined. "Perhaps he is the English nobleman who I read was expected to-day—Lord Fordyce, the paper said—and wasn't that the name of rather a prominent English politician who had to go into the Upper House last year when his father died—and it was considered he would be a loss to the Commons?"

"I really don't know. I don't take the slightest interest in them or their politics. Ah! here is Moravia——" and both rose to meet a very charming lady who drove up in a victoria and got out.

She had all the perfection of detail which characterizes the very best-dressed American woman—and she had every attr