“Hu!  So you’ve just come down from the Island!  Well—­how did you like it up there?  Plenty water—­eh?” The sarcasm was too plain, and the young man, mumbling some sort of an answer, turned to go.

“Hold on there!” said Koschinsky.  “I expect a very fine bird soon.  You’d better wait.  It was here only last night; and the bird asked whether you had been in.”  Arthur started.

“For me?  Miss Silverman?”

“I said a bird,” was the dogged reply.  And then Yetta walked up to Arthur and asked:—­

“Where have you been?  Why haven’t you called?” He blushed.

“I was ashamed.”

“Because you were so, so—­frightened, that night?”

“Yes.”

“But nothing came of the affair.  The police could get no evidence.  We had no flags—­”

“That scarlet one I saw you with—­what of it?” She smiled.

“Did you look in your pockets when you got home?  I stuffed the flag in one of them while we were downstairs.”  He burst into genteel laughter.

“No, I threw off my clothes in such disgust that night that I vowed I would never get into them again.  I gave the suit to my valet.”

“Your valet,” she gravely returned; “he may become one of us.”

“Fancy, when I reached the house—­I went up in a hansom, for I was bareheaded—­my mother was giving the biggest kind of a ball.  I had no end of trouble trying to sneak in unobserved.”

She regarded him steadily.  “Isn’t it strange,” she went on, “how the bull-dog police of this town persecute us—­and they should be sympathetic.  They had to leave their own island because of tyranny.  Yet as soon as they step on this soil they feel themselves self-constituted tyrants.  Something of the sort happened with your own ancestors—­” she looked at him archly—­“the Pilgrim Fathers were not very tolerant to the Quakers, the Jews, Catholics, or any sect not their own.  Now you do not seem to have inherited that ear-slicing temperament—­”

“Oh, stop, Yetta!  Don’t make any more fun of me.  I confess I am cowardly—­I hate rows and scandals—­”

“’What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his liberty?’”

“Yes, I know.  But this was such a nasty little affair.  The newspapers would have driven me crazy.”

“But suppose, for the sake of argument,” she said, “that the row would not have appeared in the newspapers—­what then?”

“What do you mean?  By Jove, there was nothing in the papers, now that I come to think of it.  I went the next morning out to Tuxedo and forgot—­what do you mean by this mystery, Yetta?”

“I mean this—­suppose, for the sake of further argument, I should tell you that there was no row, no police, no arrests!” He gasped.

“O-h, what an ass I made of myself.  So that was your trial!  And I failed.  Oh, Yetta, Yetta—­what shall I say?” The girl softened.  She took both his hands in her shapely ones and murmured:—­