“Alfred, I’m afraid there are not always real men and real love for American girls in international marriages.  But Helen knows this.  It’ll be her choice.  She’ll be miserable if she marries Anglesbury.”

“It’ll serve her just right,” declared her brother.  “Helen was always crazy for glitter, adulation, fame.  I’ll gamble she never saw more of Anglesbury than the gold and ribbons on his breast.”

“I am sorry.  Anglesbury is a gentleman; but it is the money he wanted, I think.  Alfred, tell me how you came to know about me, ’way out here?  You may be assured I was astonished to find that Miss Kingsley knew me as Majesty Hammond.”

“I imagine it was a surprise,” he replied, with a laugh, “I told Florence about you—­gave her a picture of you.  And, of course, being a woman, she showed the picture and talked.  She’s in love with you.  Then, my dear sister, we do get New York papers out here occasionally, and we can see and read.  You may not be aware that you and your society friends are objects of intense interest in the U. S. in general, and the West in particular.  The papers are full of you, and perhaps a lot of things you never did.”

“That Mr. Stewart knew, too.  He said, ’You’re not Majesty Hammond?’”

“Never mind his impudence!” exclaimed Alfred; and then again he laughed.  “Gene is all right, only you’ve got to know him.  I’ll tell you what he did.  He got hold of one of those newspaper pictures of you—­the one in the Times; he took it away from here, and in spite of Florence he wouldn’t fetch it back.  It was a picture of you in riding-habit with your blue-ribbon horse, White Stockings—­remember?  It was taken at Newport.  Well, Stewart tacked the picture up in his bunk-house and named his beautiful horse Majesty.  All the cowboys knew it.  They would see the picture and tease him unmercifully.  But he didn’t care.  One day I happened to drop in on him and found him just recovering from a carouse.  I saw the picture, too, and I said to him, ’Gene, if my sister knew you were a drunkard she’d not be proud of having her picture stuck up in your room.’  Majesty, he did not touch a drop for a month, and when he did drink again he took the picture down, and he has never put it back.”

Madeline smiled at her brother’s amusement, but she did not reply.  She simply could not adjust herself to these queer free Western’ ways.  Her brother had eloquently pleaded for her to keep herself above a sordid and brilliant marriage, yet he not only allowed a cowboy to keep her picture in his room, but actually spoke of her and used her name in a temperance lecture.  Madeline just escaped feeling disgust.  She was saved from this, however, by nothing less than her brother’s naive gladness that through subtle suggestion Stewart had been persuaded to be good for a month.  Something made up of Stewart’s effrontery to her; of Florence Kingsley meeting her, frankly as it were, as an equal; of the