With the dawn a laggard breeze came winging drowsily in from the southern sea, the first thing astir in the spectral world of palm and villa. Warm and deliciously fragrant, it swept the stiff wet Bermuda grass upon the lawn of the Sherrill villa at Palm Beach, rustled the crimson hedge of hibiscus, caught the subtle perfume of jasmine and oleander and swept on to a purple-flowered vine on the white walls of the villa, a fuller, richer thing for the ghost-scent of countless flowers.
Into this gray-white world of glimmering coquina and dew-wet palm rode presently the slim, brisk figure of a girl astride a fretful horse. A royal palm dripped cool gray rain upon her as she galloped past to the shell-road looming out of the velvet stillness ahead like a dim, white ghost-trail.
The gray ocean murmured, the still gray lagoon was asleep! Here and there a haunting, elusive splash of delicate rose upon the silver promised the later color of a wakening world. It was a finer, quieter world, thought Diane, than the later day world of white hot sunlight.
With pulses atune to the morning's freshness, the girl galloped rapidly along the shell-road, the clattering thud of her horse's hoofs startling in the quiet. As yet only a sleepy bird or two had begun to twitter. There was a growing noise of wind in the grass and palms.
A century back it seemed to this girl in whom the restless gypsy tide was subtly fretting, she had left Johnny and the van at Jacksonville to come into this sensuous, tropical world of color, fashionable life and lazy days.
Coloring delicately, the metallic gray bosom of the lake presently foretold the sunrise with a primrose glow. When at length the glaring white light of the sun struck sparks from the dew upon the pine and palmetto, Diane was riding rapidly south in quest of the Florida flat-woods. There was a veritable paradise of birds in the pine barren, Dick Sherrill had said, robins and bluebirds, flickers and woodpeckers with blazing cockades, shrikes and chewinks.
It was an endless monotony of pine trees, vividly green and far apart, into which Diane presently rode. A buzzard floated with uptilted wings above the sparse woodland to the west. A gorgeous butterfly, silver-spangled, winged its way over the saw palmetto and sedge between the trees to an inviting glade beyond, cleft by a shallow stream. Swamp, jungle, pine and palmetto were vocal with the melody of many birds.
Diane reined in her horse with a thrill. This was Florida, at last, not the unreal, exotic brilliance of Palm Beach. Here was her father's beloved Flowerland which she had loved as a child. Here were pines and tall grass, sun-silvered, bending in the warm wind, and the song of a pine-wood sparrow!
From the scrub ahead came his quiet song, infinitely sweet, infinitely plaintive like the faint, soft echo of a fairy's dream. A long note and a shower of silver-sweet echoes, so it ran, the invisible singer seeming to sing for himself alone. So might elfin bells have pealed from a thicket, inexpressibly low and tender.
Diane sat motionless, the free, wild grace of her seeming a part of the primeval quiet. For somehow, by some twist of singer's magic, this Florida bird was singing of Connecticut wind and river, of dogwood on a ridge, of water lilies in the purple of a summer twilight, of a spot named forever in her mind—Arcadia.
Now as the girl listened, a beautiful brown sprite of the rustling pine wood about her, a great flood of color crept suddenly from the brown full throat to the line of her hair, and the scarlet that lingered in her cheeks was wilder than the red of winter holly.
Surely—surely there was no reason under Heaven why the little bird should sing about a hay-camp!
But sing of it he did with a swelling throat and a melodic quiver of nerve and sinew, and a curious dialogue followed.
"A hay-camp is a very foolish thing, to be sure!" sang the bird with a dulcet shower of plaintive notes.
"To be sure," said the voice of the girl's conscience, "to be sure it is. But how very like him!"
"But—but there was the bullet—"
"I have often thought of it," owned the Voice.
"A gallant gentleman must see that his lady comes to no harm. 'Tis the way of gallant gentlemen—"
"Hum!"
"And he never once spoke of his discomfort on the long hot road, though a hay-camp is subject to most singular mishaps."
"I—I have often marveled."
"He is brave and sturdy and of charming humor—"
"A superlative grain of humor perhaps, and he's very lazy—"
"And fine and frank and honorable. One may not forget Arcadia and the rake of twigs."
"One may not forget, that is very true. But he seeks to make himself out such a very great fool—-"
"He cloaks each generous instinct with a laughing drollery. Why did you hum when you cooked his supper and called to him through the trees?"
"I—I do not know."
"'Twas the world-old instinct of primitive woman!"
"No! No! No! It was only because I was living the life I love the best. I was very happy."
"Why were you happier after the storm?"
"I—I do not know."
"You have scolded with flashing eyes about the hay-camp—"
"But—I—I did not mind. I tried to mind and could not—"
"That is a very singular thing."
"Yes."
"Why have you not told him of the tall sentinel you have furtively watched of moonlit nights among the trees, a sentinel who slept by day upon a ridiculous bed of hay that he might smoke and watch over the camp of his lady until peep o' day?"
"I—do not know."
"You are sighing even now for the van and a camp fire—for the hay-camp through the trees—"
"No!" with a very definite flash of perversity.
"Where is this persistent young nomad of the hay-camp anyway?"
"I—I have wondered myself."
But with a quiver of impatience the horse had pawed the ground and the tiny bird flew off to a distant clump of palmetto.
Diane rode hurriedly off into the flat-woods.
It had been an unforgettable day, this day in the pine woods. Diane had forded shallow streams and followed bright-winged birds, lunched by a silver lake set coolly in the darkling shade of cypress and found a curious nest in the stump of a tree. Now with a mass of creeping blackberry and violets strapped to her saddle she was riding slowly back through the pine woods.
Though the sun, which awhile back had filled the hollow of palmetto fronds with a ruddy pool of light, had long since dropped behind the horizon, the girl somehow picked the homeward trail with the unerring instinct of a wild thing. That one may be hopelessly lost in the deceptive flatwoods she dismissed with a laugh. The wood is kind to wild things.
It was quite dark when through the trees ahead she caught the curious glimmer of a cart wheel of flame upon the ground, hub and spokes glowing vividly in the center of a clearing. Curiously the girl rode toward it, unaware that the picturesque fire-wheel ahead was the typical camp fire of the southern Indian, or that the strange wild figure squatting gravely by the fire in lonely silhouette against the white of a canvas-covered wagon beyond in the trees, was a vagrant Seminole from the proud old turbaned tribe who still dwell in the inaccessible morasses of the Everglades.
The realization came in a disturbed flash of interest and curiosity. Though the Florida Indian harmed no one, he still considered himself proudly hostile to the white man. Wherefore Diane wisely wheeled her horse about to retreat.
It was too late. Already the young Seminole was upon his feet, keen of vision and hearing for all he seemed but a tense, still statue in the wildwood.
Accepting the situation with good grace, Diane rode fearlessly toward his fire and reined in her horse. But the ready word of greeting froze upon her lips. For the nomad of the fire-wheel was a girl, tall and slender, barbarically arrayed in the holiday garb of a Seminole chief. The firelight danced upon the beaten band of silver about her brilliant turban and the beads upon her sash, upon red-beaded deerskin leggings delicately thonged from the supple waist to the small and moccasined foot, upon a tunic elaborately banded in red and a belt of buckskin from which hung a hunting knife, a revolver and an ammunition pouch.
But Diane's fascinated gaze lingered longest upon the Indian girl's face. Her smooth, vivid skin was nearer the hue of the sun-dark Caucasian than of the red man, and lovelier than either, with grave, vigilant eyes of dusk, a straight, small nose and firm, proud mouth vividly scarlet like the wild flame in her cheeks.
Aloof, impassive, the Indian girl stared back.
"I wish well to the beautiful daughter of white men!" she said at length with native dignity. The contralto of her voice was full and rich and very musical, her English, deliberate and clear-cut.
Immensely relieved—for the keen glance of those dark Indian eyes had suddenly softened—Diane leaped impetuously from her horse; across the fire white girl and Indian maid clasped hands.
"Do forgive me!" she exclaimed warmly. "But I saw your fire and turned this way before I really knew what I was doing." Just as Diane won the confidence of every wild thing in the forest, so now with her winsome grace and unaffected warmth, she won the Indian girl.
Some subtle, nameless sympathy of the forest leaped like a spark from eye to eye—then with a slow, grave smile in which there was much less reserve, the Seminole motioned her guest to a seat by the fire.
Nothing loath, Diane promptly tethered her horse and squatted Indian fashion by the cartwheel fire, immensely thrilled and diverted by her picturesque adventure.
"My name," she offered presently with her ready smile, "is Diane."
"Di-ane," said the Indian girl majestically. And added naïvely, "She was the Roman goddess of light—and of hunting, is it not so?"
Diane looked very blank.
"Where in the world—" she stammered, staring, and colored.
The Indian girl smiled.
"From so high," she said shyly, "I have been taught by Mic-co. Like the white student of books, I know many curious things that he has taught me."
"And your name?" asked Diane, heroically mastering her mystified confusion. "May I—may I not know that too?"
"Shock-kil-law," came the ready reply.
"That readily becomes Keela!" exclaimed Diane smiling.
The girl nodded.
"So Mic-co has said. And so indeed he calls me."
"Tell me, Keela, what does it mean?"
"Red-winged blackbird," said Keela.
It was eminently fitting, thought Diane, and glanced at Keela's hair and cheeks.
There was a wild duck roasting in the hub of coals—from the burning spokes came the smell of cedar. The Indian girl majestically broke a segment of koonti bread and proffered it to her companion. With faultless courtesy Diane accepted and presently partook with healthy relish of a supper of duck and sweet potatoes.
The silence of the Indian girl was utterly without constraint.
"I wonder," begged Diane impetuously, "if you'll tell me who Mic-co is? I'm greatly interested. He taught you about Rome?"
Nodding, the Indian girl said in her quaint, deliberate English that Mic-co was her white foster father. The Seminoles called him Es-ta-chat-tee-mic-co—chief of the White Race. Most of them called him simply Mic-co. He was a great and good medicine man of much wisdom who dwelt upon a fertile chain of swamp islands in the Everglades. The Indians loved him.
Still puzzled, Diane diffidently ventured a question or two, marveling afresh at the girl's beauty and singular costume.
"I am of no race," said Keela sombrely. "My father was a white man; my mother not all Indian; my grandfather—a Minorcan. Six moons I live with my white foster father. And I live then as I wish—like the daughter of white men. Six moons I dwell with the clan of my mother. Such is my life since the old chief made the compact with Mic-co. Come!" she added and led the way to the Indian wagon.
"When the night-winds call," she said wistfully, "I grow restless—for I am happiest in the lodge of Mic-co. Then the old chief bids me travel to the world of white men and sell." There was gentle pathos in her mellow voice.
Pieces of ancient pottery, quaint bleached bits of skeleton, beads and shells and trinkets of gold unearthed from the Florida sand mounds, moccasins and baskets, koonti starch and plumes, such were the picturesque wares which Keela peddled when the stir of her mingled blood drove her forth from the camp of her forbears.
Diane bought generously, harnessed her saddle with clanking relics and regretfully mounted her horse.
"Let me come again to-morrow!" she begged.
"Uncah!" granted the girl in Seminole and her great black eyes were very friendly.
Looking back as she rode through the flat-woods, Diane marveled afresh. It was a far cry indeed from the camp of a Seminole to the legends of Rome.
But the primeval flavor of the night presently dissolved in the glare of acetylenes from a long gray car standing motionless by the roadside ahead. The climbing moon shone full upon the face of a bareheaded motorist idly smoking a cigarette and waiting.
Diane reined in her horse with a jerk and a clank of relics.
"Philip Poynter!" she exclaimed.
The driver laughed.
"I wonder," said he, "if you know what a shock you've thrown into your aunt by staying out in the flat-woods until dark. She once knew a man who lost himself. Incidentally they are mighty deceptive to wander about in. The trees are so far apart that one never seems to get into them. And then, having meanwhile effectively got in without knowing it, one never seems to get out."
"Where," demanded Diane indignantly, "did you come from anyway?"
"If you hadn't been so ambitious," Philip assured her with mild resentment, "you'd have seen me at breakfast. I arrived at Sherrill's last night. As it is, I've been sitting here an hour or so watching you swap wildwood yarns with the aborigine yonder. And Ann Sherrill sent me after you in Dick's speediest car. Ho, uncle!"
An aged negro appeared from certain shadows to which Philip had lazily consigned him.
"Uncle," said Philip easily, "will ride your horse back to Sherrill's for you. I picked him up on the road. You'll motor back with me?"
Diane certainly would not.
"Then," regretted Philip, "I'm reduced to the painful and spectacular expedient of just grazing the heels of your fiery steed with Dick's racer all the way back to Sherrill's and matching up his hoof-beats on the shell-road with a devil's tattoo on the horn."
Greatly vexed, Diane resigned her horse to the waiting negro, who rode off into the moonlight with a noisy clank. Mr. Poynter's face was radiant.
"And after running the chance of a night in the pine barrens," he mused admiringly, "you amble out of the danger zone in the most matter-of-fact manner with your saddle clanking like a bone-yard. I don't wonder your aunt fusses. What made the racket?"
"Bones and shells and things."
"Well, for such absolute irresponsibility as you've developed since you've been out of the chastening jurisdiction of the hay-camp, I'd respectfully suggest that you marry the very first bare-headed motorist, smoking a cigarette, whom you happened to see as you rode out of the pine-woods."
"Philip," said Diane disdainfully, "the moon—"
"Is on my head again," admitted Philip. "I know. It always gets me. We'd better motor around a bit and clear my brain out. I'd hate awfully to have the Sherrills think I'm in love."
Almost anything one could say, reflected Diane uncomfortably, inspired Philip's brain to fresh fertility.
The camp of Keela, domiciled indefinitely in the flat-woods to sell to winter tourists, proved a welcome outlet for the fretting gypsy tide in Diane's veins. She found the Indian girl's magnetism irresistible.
Proud, unerringly truthful, fastidious in speech and personal habit, truly majestic and generous, such was the shy woodland companion with whom Diane chose willfully to spend her idle hours, finding the girl's unconstrained intervals of silence, her flashes of Indian keenness, her inborn reticence and naïve parade of the wealth of knowledge Mic-co had taught her, a most bewildering book in which there was daily something new to read.
There was a keen, quick brain behind the dark and lovely eyes, a faultless knowledge of the courtesies of finer folk. Mic-co had wrought generously and well. Only the girl's inordinate shyness and the stern traditions of her tribe, Diane fancied, kept her chained to her life in the Glades.
Keela, strangely apart from Indian and white man, and granted unconventional license by her tribe, hungered most for the ways of the white father of whom she frequently spoke.
Diane learned smoke signals and the blazing and blinding of a trail, an inexhaustible and tragic fund of tribal history which had been handed down from mouth to mouth for generations, legends and songs, wailing dirges and native dances and snatches of the chaste and oathless speech of the Florida Indian.
"Diane, dear!" exclaimed Ann Sherrill one lazy morning, "what in the world is that exceedingly mournful tune you're humming?"
"That," said Diane, "is the 'Song of the Great Horned Owl,' my clever little Indian friend taught me. Isn't it plaintive?"
"It is!" said Ann with deep conviction. "Entirely too much so. I feel creepy. And Nathalie says you did some picturesque dance for her and your aunt—"
"The 'Dance of the Wild Turkey,'" explained Diane, much amused at the recollection. "Aunt Agatha insisted that it was some iniquitous and cunningly disguised Seminole species of turkey trot. She was horribly shocked and grew white as a ghost at my daring—"
"Fiddlesticks!" said Ann Sherrill. "She ought to have all the shock out of her by now after bringing up you and Carl! I'm going to ride out to the flat-woods with you, for I'm simply dying for a new sensation. Dick's as stupid as an owl. He does nothing but hang around the Beach Club. And Philip Poynter's tennis mad. He looks hurt if you ask him to do anything else except perhaps to trail fatuously after you. It's the flat-woods for mine."
Ann returned from her visit to the Indian camp scintillant with italics and enthusiasm.
"My dear," she said, "I'm wild about her—quite wild! … I'm going again and again! … If I knew half as much and were half as lovely— Why, do you know, Diane, she set me right about some ridiculous quotation, and I never try to get them straight, for half the time I find my own way so much more expressive… There's Philip Poynter with a tennis racquet again! Diane, I'm losing patience with him."
From her madcap craving for new sensation, Ann was destined to evolve an inspiration which with customary energy and Diane's interested connivance she swept through to fruition, unaware that Fate marched, leering, at her heels.
Curious things may happen when masked men hold revel under a moonlit sky.
Thus in a tropical garden of palm and fountain, of dark, shifting shadows and a thousand softly luminous Chinese lanterns swaying in a breeze of spice, a Bedouin talked to an ancient Greek.
"He is here?" asked the Bedouin with an accent slightly foreign.
"Yes," said the Greek. "He is here and immensely relieved, I take it, to be rid of the jurisdiction of the hay-camp."
"I fancied he would not dare—"
"A man in love," commented the Greek dryly, "dares much for the sake of his lady. One may conceivably lack discretion without forfeiting his claim to courage."
"The disguise of his stained and shaven face," hinted the Bedouin grimly, "has made him over-confident. Having tested it with apparent success upon you—"
"Even so. But he has forgotten that few men have such striking eyes."
"If he has taken the pains to assure himself of my whereabouts," rumbled the Bedouin, "as he surely has, I am of course still blistering in extreme southern Florida, hunting tarpon. I have a permanent Washington address which I have taken pains to notify of my interest in tarpon and to which he writes. These incognito days," added the Bedouin with a slight smile, "my cipher communications cross an ocean and return immediately by trusted hands to America, though I, of course, know nothing of it. Those from my charming minstrel to me—make similar tours."
"And I?"
"You—my secretary—having spent a few days with the Sherrills on your way to join me after months of frivoling with a hay-camp, have been forced by telegram to depart before the fête de nuit to which Miss Sherrill begged our attendance. Rest assured he knows that too. Therefore, to unmask unobtrusively and slip away to his room, and in the absence of other guests to linger for a week of incognito quiet—voila! he is quite safe though imprudent!"
Greek and Bedouin fell silent, watching the laughing pageant in the garden.
Venetian lamps glowed like yellow witch-lights in the branches; fountains tossed moon-bright sprays of quicksilver aloft and tinkled with the splash; the waters of a sunken pool, jeweled in stars, glimmered darkly green through files of cypress. All in all, an entrancing moon-mad world of mystery and dusk-moths, heavy with the scent of jasmine and orange. And the moon played brightly on curious folk, on spangles and jewels and masked and laughing eyes.
A gray mendicant monk with sombre, thin-lipped face beneath a grayish mask slipped furtively by with a curious air of listening intently to the careless chatter about him; a fat and plaintive Queen Elizabeth followed, talking to a stout courtier who was over-trusting the seams of his satin breeches.
"I doubt if you'll believe me," puffed Queen Elizabeth dolorously, "but every day since that time she deliberately went out and lost herself all day in the flat-woods and stopped to look at that ridiculous cart with the wheel of flame when I was sure a buzzard had bitten her—No! No! I don't know, Jethro; I'm sure I don't. How should I know why it was burning? But it was. She said plainly that it was a cart wheel of fire and if it was a wheel it must certainly have been on something and what on earth would a wheel be on but a cart? Certainly one wouldn't buy a bale of cart wheels to make fires in the flat-woods. Well, it's the strangest thing, Jethro, but nearly every day since, she's visited the flat-woods and wandered about with that terrible Indian girl who isn't an Indian girl. Seems that she's a most extraordinary girl with a foster-father and she sells sand mounds—no, that's not it—the things they find in them besides the sand—and she has a queer, wild sort of culture and her father was white. Like as not Diane will come home some night scalped and she has such magnificent hair, Jethro. To her knees it is and so black! And what must she and Ann do to-night but—there, I promised Diane faithfully to keep it a secret, for they've been working for days and days and she is distractingly lovely. With the Sherrill topazes too. And now that she's sold all the sand mounds, or whatever it is, do you know, Jethro, she's going to drive Diane north to Jacksonville in the Indian wagon. They start to-morrow morning. I think it's because they're both so mad about trees and things—I can't for the life of me make it out. Jethro, Diane will drive me mad—she will indeed. Well, all I can say, Jethro, is that if you don't know what I'm talking about you must be very stupid to-night. No! No! do I ever know, Jethro? He may be here and he may not. He may be off in Egypt shooting scarabs by now. He was at the farm when he wrote to me in Indiana. Well, collecting scarabs, then, Jethro. Why do you fuss so about little things? Isn't it funny—strangest thing!"
Queen Elizabeth passed on with her aged dandy.
A dark figure by the cypress pool laughed and shrugged. He was a singular figure, this man by the pool, with a hint of the Orient in his garb. His robe was of black, with startling and unexpected flashes of scarlet lining when he walked. Black chains clanked drearily about his waist and wrists. There was a cunningly concealed light in his filmy turban which gave it the singular appearance of a dark cloud lighted by an inner fire. As he wandered about with clanking chains, he played strange music upon a polished thing of hollow bones. Sometimes the music laughed and wooed when eyes were kind; sometimes when eyes were over-daring it was subtly impudent and eloquent. Sometimes it was so unspeakably weird and melancholy that along with the clanking chains and the strangely luminous turban, many a careless stroller turned and stared. So did a slender, turbaned Seminole chief with a minstrel at his heels.
It was upon this picturesque young Seminole that the eyes of the Greek by the hibiscus lingered longest, but the eyes of the Bedouin scanned every line of the minstrel's ragged corduroy with grim amusement.
"A romantic garb, by Allah!" said the Bedouin dryly.
"It has served its purpose," reminded the Greek sombrely. And laughed with relish.
For the Seminole chief had fled perversely through the lantern-lit trees, her soft, mocking laughter proclaiming her sex and her mood.
"And still he follows!" boomed the Bedouin. "With or without the music-machine, he is consistently fatuous."
The man with the luminous turban spoke suddenly to a girl in trailing satin with a muff of flowers in her hand. Shoulders and throat gleamed superbly above the line of golden satin; there were flashing topazes in her hair and about her throat; and the slender, arched foot in the satin slipper was small and finely moulded.
"Tell me," he begged insistently, "who you are! You've grace and poise enough for a dozen women. And who taught you how to walk? Few women know how."
The girl, with a delicate air of hauteur, flung back her head imperiously and turned away.
"And you've wonderful eyes—black and wistful and tragic and beautiful!" persisted the man impudently. "Wonderful, sparkling lady of gold and black, tell me who you are!"
"Who," said the girl gravely in a clear, rich contralto, "who are you?"
The man laughed but his eyes lingered on the firm, proud scarlet lips and the small even teeth.
"Call me the 'Black Palmer,'" said he. "There's a tremendous significance in my rig to be sure, but it's only for one man."
"What," asked the girl seriously, "is a palmer?"
Mystified the Black Palmer stared.
"You honestly mean that you don't know?"
"I speak ever the truth," said the proud scarlet lips below the golden mask. "When I ask, I mean that I do not know."
"And this in a world of sophistication!" murmured the man blankly, but the girl was moving off with graceful majesty through the trees, the jewels in her hair alive in the lantern-lit dusk. The Black Palmer sprang after her.
"Tell me, I beg of you," he exclaimed earnestly, "you who are so grave and beautiful and apart from this world of mine, like a fresh keen wind in a scorching desert, in Heaven's name tell me who you are!"
But the girl's dark, fine eyes flashed quick rebuke.
Nothing daunted the Black Palmer impudently stripped the golden mask from her face. The soft yellow light of the Venetian lamp in the tree above her fell full upon the lovely oval of a face so peculiar in its striking beauty of line and vivid coloring that he fell back staring.
"Lord, what a face!" exclaimed the Greek, too taken aback to resent the Palmer's insolence.
And the Bedouin rumbled: "Exquisite! But she is not of your land. Italian, Spanish, or some bizarre mingling of strange races, but none of your colder lands!"
Now as the Black Palmer stared at the dark, accusing eyes of the girl, a singular thing occurred. His cloak of impudence fell suddenly from his shoulders and returning the golden mask, he bowed and begged her pardon with unmistakable deference.
"Let a humbled Palmer," he said quietly, "pay his sincerest homage to the most beautiful woman he has even seen." And as the girl moved proudly away, the strain of fantastic music which followed her was subtly deferential.
At midnight a mellow chime rang somewhere by the cypress pool. Laughing and jesting, calling to one another, the masked crowd moved off to the vine-hung villa ahead, gleaming moon-white through the shrubbery.
Somewhat reluctantly the minstrel followed. It had been his intention to unmask in some secluded corner whence, presently, he might slip away to his room, but finding himself jostled and pushed on by a Greek and a Bedouin who, to do them justice, seemed quite unaware of their importunities, he surrendered to the press about him and presently found himself in an unpleasantly conspicuous spot in the great room which the Sherrills occasionally used as a ballroom.
All about him girls and men were unmasking amid a shower of laughing raillery. That the Seminole chief with her tunic and beaded sash and her brilliant turban was very near him, was a pleasant and altogether accidental mitigation of his mishap. That a Greek and a Bedouin were just behind him—a fact not in the least accidental—and that a gray monk was slipping about among the guests whispering to receptive ears, did not interest him in the least. A string orchestra played softly in an alcove. The leader's eyes, oddly enough, were upon the ancient Greek.
Now suddenly a curious hush swept over the room. Uncomfortably aware that he was a spectacular object of interest by reason of his mask and that every unmasked eye was full upon him, the minstrel, following the lines of least resistance, removed the bit of cambric from his eyes. After all, in the sea of faces before him, there were none familiar.
As the mask dropped—the ancient Greek thoughtfully adjusted his tunic.
Instantly without pause or warning the soft strain of the orchestra swept dramatically into a powerful melody of measured cadences. It was the tune Carl had played upon his flute to Jokai of Vienna months before. The minstrel, mask in hand, stared at the orchestra, blanched and bit his lip.
"God bless my soul!" exclaimed Queen Elizabeth to Jethro, "it's the immigrant, Jethro, and there he was on the lace spread with his feet tied and gurgling. I'll never forget his eyes."
"Jokai of Vienna!" said the Black Palmer, whistling. "By Jove, they've trapped him nicely."
For an uncomfortable instant, the silence continued, then came the saving stir of laughter and chatting.
The Bedouin with an unrelenting air of dignity and command, removed his mask and bowed low; to Diane in whose startled eyes below the Seminole turban flashed sympathy and acute regret.
"Miss Westfall," said he gravely, "permit me to present to you, Prince Ronador of Houdania."
White and stern, his fine eyes flashing imperially, Ronador bowed.
"Rest assured, Miss Westfall," he said, "that I know you have not betrayed my confidence. Baron Tregar is an ardent patriot who by virtue of his office must needs object to democratic masquerading."
The Baron stroked his beard.
"For inspiring the musical ceremony due your rank, Prince," he said dryly, "I crave indulgence."
Smiling, the ancient Greek at the Baron's elbow unmasked, to show the cheerful face of Mr. Poynter.
"Prince," said Mr. Poynter, "I sincerely trust I have made no error in transcribing the Regent's Hymn for our excellent musicians. Having heard it so many times in your presence in Houdania, I could not well forget. At your service," with a glance at his Grecian attire, "Herodotus, father of nomads!"
But Ann Sherrill in the gorgeous raiment of a Semiramis was already at hand, sparkling italics upon her royal guest, and Philip moved aside.
"I am overwhelmed!" whispered Ann a little later. "I am indeed! I was not in the least aware that our mysterious incognito was a prince, were you, Diane?"
"Yes," said Diane. Her color was very high and she deliberately avoided the imploring eyes of Mr. Poynter.
"What in the world is it all about?" begged Ann helplessly. "And who was the grayish monk who flitted about so mysteriously telling us that the minstrel was a prince! It spread like wildfire. As for you, Philip Poynter, it's exactly like you! To depart night before last and suddenly reappear is quite of a piece with your mysterious habit of fading periodically out of civilization. Baron Tregar, how exceedingly delightful of you to come this way and surprise me when I fancied you were so keen about those horrid tarpon that you wouldn't leave them for all I wrote and wrote."
There was a sprightly nervousness in Ann's manner. She was uncomfortably aware of a subtle undercurrent.
"And I've another unexpected guest," she added to Diane. "Carl's here. Wandering in from Heaven knows where, as he always does. He's making his peace with your aunt—"
Herodotus, who had been trying for some time to get into friendly communication with his lady, suddenly murmured "Frost in Florida!" with audible regret and moved off good-humoredly to look for Carl.
He found that young man listening attentively to his aunt's reproaches.
"And that costume, Carl," fluttered Queen Elizabeth in aggrieved disapproval. "Why, dear me, it's enough to make a body shudder, it's so sort of sinister—it is indeed! And I do hope you don't set your hair on fire with that extraordinary light in your turban. Is it a candle or an electric bulb?"
"A forty horse power glowworm!" Carl assured her gravely, and the portly Jethro sniggered to the danger of his seams.
Philip's hand came down heavily upon the Palmer's broad shoulder and Carl wheeled. In that instant as he grasped Philip's hand in a silence more eloquent than words, every finer instinct of his queerly balanced nature flashed in his face. The two hands tightened and fell apart.
"Come, smoke!" invited Carl, smiling. "I'm glad you're here. I haven't been ragged and abused for so long there's a lonely furrow in my soul."
But Dick Sherrill, looking very warm and disgruntled in a costume he informed them bitterly was meant for Claude Duval, came up as they were turning away and insisted upon presenting Carl to the guest of the evening.
"Ann sent me," he added. "And you've got to come. And I want to say right now that Ann makes me tired. She's as notional as a lunatic. She planned this rig and now she doesn't like it. And if I don't look like a highwayman you can wager your last sou I feel like one, and that's sufficient. The whole trouble is that Ann's been so busy with hair-dressers and manicurists and corsetières and dressmakers and the Lord knows what not over that stunning Indian girl, who'll likely run off with the family topazes, that she's had no time for her brother, and rubs it in now by laughing at the shape of my legs. What's the matter with my legs, Carl?"
"Too ornamental," said Carl. "Curvilinear grace is all very well but—"
"Shut up!" said Sherrill viciously. "Have you ever met this king-pin I'm exploiting?"
"I've seen him," said Car. "Once when he was riding up the mountain road to Houdania with a brilliant escort and one—er—other time. Think I told you I'd spent a month or so in a Houdanian monastery several years ago, didn't I, Dick?"
"Yes," said Dick. "That's why I asked. Poynter, who in blue blazes are you looking for?"
Philip flushed.
"Dry up!" he advised. "You're grouchy."
Sherrill was still heatedly denying the charge when they halted near the Baron.
"You wear a singular costume," suggested Ronador stiffly, when the formalities of presentation were at an end. He glanced at the luminous turban and thence to the chains. Carl, though he had primarily intended the singular rig for the eyes of Tregar, had subtly invited the remark. His eyes were darkly ironic.
"Prince," he said guilelessly, "it is a silent parable."
"Yes?"
"I am 'The Ghost of a Man's Past!'" explained the Palmer lightly—and clanked his chains. The level glances of the two met with the keenness of invisible swords.
"The heavy, sinister black," suggested the Palmer, "the flashes of forbidden scarlet—the hours of a man's past are scarlet, are they not?—the cloud above the head, with a treacherous heart of fire, the clanking chains of bondage—they are all here. And the skeleton in the closet—Sire—behold!" He laughed and flung back his mantle, revealing a perfect skeleton cunningly etched in glaring white upon a close-fitting garment of black.
Did the Baron's eyes flash suddenly with a queer dry humor? Philip could not be sure.
With a clank of symbolic chains Carl bowed and withdrew, and coming suddenly upon his cousin, halted and stared. Long afterward Diane was to remember that she had caught a similar look in the eyes of Ronador.
"Well?" she begged, slightly uncomfortable.
Carl smiled. Once more his fine eyes were impassive. With ready grace he admired the delicately-thonged tunic and the beaded sash, the bright turban with the beaten band of silver and the darkly lovely face beneath it.
"It's a duplicate of the rig my little Indian friend wears," she explained, smiling. "Hasn't Ann told you? She's quite wild about it."
"Ann's very busy soothing Dick," laughed Carl and to the malicious satisfaction of that worthy Greek who had been trailing along in his wake, presented Herodotus. Diane nodded, smiled politely—and sought delicately to ignore the ancient Greek. It was a hopeless task. Mr. Poynter insisted upon considering himself included in every word she uttered.
"Isn't mother a dear!" exclaimed Ann Sherrill joining them. "After ragging me desperately for days about Keela, until I threatened to kill myself, and giving me an exceedingly horrid little book on the advisability of curbing one's most interesting impulses, she's taken her under her wing to-night and they're excellent friends. Philip, dear, go unruffle Dick. He's horribly fussed up about something or other. Carl, I want you to meet Keela. It's the most interesting thing I've dared in ages and Dad's been very decent about it. Dad always did understand me. He has a sense of humor."
Diane and Carl followed, laughing, at her heels. Ann presently found her mother and Keela and unaware of the astonished interest in Carl's eyes, presented him.
"The Black Palmer!" said Keela naïvely.
"Lady of Gold and Black!" said Carl and bowed profoundly.