gers, and went sadly back to his bachelor haunts in the hope of forgetting. But he was appalled to find that he no longer fitted in.
The friends of the free and easy days of his celibacy were sincere enough in their pity for him, though in no way disposed to put themselves out seeking reclamation. In short, they might as well have said in chorus:
"You couldn't have expected us to forewarn you; you'd have quit us cold. You had to discover it for yourself, and the operation of finding out has simply rendered you impossible as one of the old crowd. Sorry, old man, but, after all, it's better that you should know."
So Henry Fayne brooded, lost his nerve, and then, all of a sudden—disappeared.
The old circle knew his set and cynical face no more. There were rumors of mental breakdown and suicide, and there was one report (little credited, however) that the unfortunate fellow had drifted down into the wilds of South America and become an eccentric and a recluse.
Leanor tired, in time, of the murderous velocity of her social chariot, dumped the winged vehicle on the trash-heap and went abroad, accompanied by a less rich and more ambitious retinue of high livers.
Like vari-colored butterflies, five years winged overhead, years by no means lacking in color and Variety for Leanor. Exacting as were her tastes, she could scarcely have desired a more changeful, a more exquisitely exhilarating life.
Only once in a blue moon did she think of Henry. Thoughts of him, like all other memories of her meteoric-past, had been crowded into oblivion by the inrush of the more intimate and actual.
Henry had been very good to her, she had to admit, but he had been none the less impossible. The outcome had been inevitable from the beginning. He was fifteen years her senior. She knew that she could never have held her volatile self down to a life of self-sacrifice and suffering with Henry. The idea was no less absurd than the mating of an esthetic humming-bird with some sedate old owl.
When she consented to marry Henry she had entertained no such preposterous thought as exacting of him a compliance with the ridiculously restricted code of ethics he subsequently set for her. Indeed, she would have grown old and ugly with nothing accomplished, unseeking and unsought. Too, there would have been lamentably fewer notches on her ivory fan than the half-decade last past had yielded.
As the wretched venture had turned out, however, she was still under thirty and was, to employ the homely simile of her latest masculine objective, "as pretty as a peach."
AT THE Pacific entrance of the Grand Canal, where the town of Bandora drowses like a sprawling lizard on the sun-baked clay, word went round that the millionaire adventuress was yachting down the west coast, homeward bound.
Everybody who read the public prints knew about Leanor, so at least one element at Bandora awaited her arrival with curious interest. And the curious were to be gratified, for since pretty Leanor habitually did the unexpected, she only proved her consistency when, upon her arrival, she capriciously decided to tarry a fortnight, with the two-fold object of having a look at the great waterway and exploring historic Batoga Island, only a couple of hours distant.
Should the mighty monument to engineering skill prove uninteresting, there remained the secret caves of Batoga, among them La Guaca de San Pedro, by allegation the identical haunted, bat-inhabited cavern in which buccaneering old Henry Morgan had once stored all of his ill-gotten gains and maybe imprisoned the unfortunate nuns captured at Porto Bello! And then, too, there was the celebrated Devil's Channel, which, according to widely circulated and much-believed stories, sucked small craft down into its omnivorous maw like some insatiable demon lying in wait.
Leanor devoted but little time to the prodigious engineering feat. After all, it was man-made, and what was man if not a purveyor to feminine caprices? Mere men were cheap. The adventuress knew, because she had bought and sold many of them. She had bartered the very souls of some.
She had bought them all with make-believe affection and disposed of them at a hundred per cent discount. She treated them much as one treats cast-off garments, experiencing only minor difficulties in disengaging herself from some of the more persistent.
A genuine Sybarite, Leanor's appetite for entities masculine had at last cloyed, and she now turned impatiently to inscrutable old Nature to make up the deficiency.
She went to Batoga, a verdant, mighty mountain, greenly shaggy, as yet unshorn by advancing civilization. It might have been a little separate world, set down by nature in a sleeping sea of sapphire. Here, indeed, was something, different.
She was wild with delight as soon as her dainty feet touched the shell-paved beach. Really, this wonderland was too splendidly perfect to share with her unpoetic company of paid buffoons! She sent the whole lot of them bagging back to Bandora, decided to employ a guide, a boatman, or a native maid, contingent upon her special needs, right on the ground.
It was due to this whim of Leanor's that I myself wandered into the cast, came to know Leanor and likewise the story I am telling you here. I had just come through a notably obstinate case of dengue in the sanitarium. My thin knees, in fact, were still somewhat wobbly, and I was urging them back to normal by means of a leisurely stroll across the rolling pasture-land. On a grassy, wind-swept hillside I came all unexpectedly upon Leanor.
Evidently she had thought to refresh her jaded wits by a revel in wild flowers. She was seated on a shelf of rock that rimmed the hill-crown, culling unworthy floral specimens. A single upward glance, and then her eyes dropped back to her flowers in a world-bored manner which I somehow felt a quick impulse to resent. At least I could annoy her. That was any fool's privilege.
"Gathering flowers?" I interrogated, just as though that fact were not as obvious as the blue sky itself.
For answer, my front-line fortifications were instantly swept by an ocular onslaught well calculated to obliterate. I smiled back engagingly at the source of the tempest.
"Some hill, this," I suggested, emitting a windy sigh after the exertion of its ascent.
And then I saw that my second drive had broken through her first-line trench on a front of about a quarter of an inch. Disdain died slowly out of her face—a face still unaccountably fresh and girlish—and something like pity at my apparent lack of sophistication took its place.
"You really think it a high hill?" she asked, faintly smiling and gazing at me steadily as though she doubted my sanity.
I noted that her hazel eyes seemed to swim in seas of a wonderfully sparkling liquid.
"Well," I qualified, affecting funereal gravity, "it's higher than some hills."
Her amused smile expanded perceptibly.
"Really, now, have you ever seen very many hills?"
