“Oh, Miss Polly,” he began, taking a step toward her, “if you’d only let me—­”

She put up one little sunburned hand.

“Please, Fitz!  I—­I don’t feel up to it to-day.”

Humbly he subsided.

“I’d no right to ask you the question,” he apologized.  “It was kind of you to answer me at all.”

“You’re really a dear, Fitz,” she said, smiling a little wanly.  “Sometimes I wish—­”

She did not finish her sentence, but wandered over to the window, and gazed out across the square.  On the far side something quite out of the ordinary seemed to be going on.

“The legless beggar seems to have collected quite an audience,” she remarked idly.

Her suitor joined her on the parlor balcony.

“Possibly he’s starting a revolution.  Any one can do it down here.”

Vehement adjuration, in a high, strident voice, came floating across to them.

“Listen!” cried the girl.  “He’s speaking.  English, isn’t he?”

“It seems to be a mixture of English, French, and Spanish.  Quite a polyglot the friend of your friend Perkins appears to be.”

She turned steady eyes upon him.

“Mr. Perkins is not my friend.”

“No?”

“I never want to see him, or to hear his name again.”

“Ah, then you’ve found out about him?”

“Yes.”  She flushed.  “Yes—­at least—­Yes,” she concluded.

“He admitted it to you?”

“No, he lied about it.”

“I think I shall go up and make a call on Mr. Perkins,” said Carroll, with formidable quiet.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she answered wearily.  “He’d only run away and hide.”  As she said it, her inner self convicted her tongue of lying.

“Very likely.  Yet, see here, Miss Polly,—­I want to be fair to that fellow.  It doesn’t follow that because he’s a coward he’s a cad.”

“He isn’t a coward!” she flashed.

“You just said yourself that he’d run and hide.”

“Well, he wouldn’t, and he is a cad.”

“As you like.  In any case, I shall make it a point to see him before I leave.  If he can explain, well and good.  If not—­” He did not conclude.

“Our orator seems to have finished,” observed the girl.  “I shall go back upstairs and write some good-bye notes to the kind people here.”

“Just for curiosity, I think I’ll drive across and look at the legless Demosthenes,” said her companion.  “I was going to do a little shopping, anyway.  So I’ll report later, if he’s revoluting or anything exciting.”

From her own balcony, when she reached it, Polly had a less obstructed view of the beggar’s appropriated corner, and she looked out a few minutes after she reached the room to see whether he had resumed his oratory.  Apparently he had not, for the crowd had melted away.  The legless one was rocking himself monotonously upon his stumps.  His head was sunk forward, and from his extraordinary mouthings the spectator judged that he must be talking to himself with resumed vehemence.  From what next passed before her astonished vision, Miss Brewster would have suspected herself of a hallucination of delirium had she not been sure of normal health.