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“Bless me! You take my breath away.”

“Never mind! Catch it again. Oh, do please! Please do! and come along!”

“But you must give me time to think,” and Miss Winchester began cogitating how she would turn an apparent impossibility into an assured fact.

“Oh, don’t think too much,” exclaimed Adele, when the result of thinking looked precarious. “Just do it,—why, don’t you see? The opportunity of our lives! We shall learn so much.”

Now it so happened, the circumstances being favorable, that Adele’s last appeal touched upon a matter in Miss Winchester’s past experience, and excited a far more potent incentive to join the party than any amount of contagious enthusiasm could ever have accomplished.

Miss Winchester had not long before published a successful novel based upon results of travel, including character sketches, the result of careful observation amid episodes of ordinary life. She had given it the whimsical title of “Upside Down.” Now what could possibly be more opportune than to follow this with others,—say on “Downside Up,” or, better still, “Outside and Inside”? And where could more be found of circumstantial interest than in the Orient? Who knows!—it might lead to still another, “Turned Inside Out,” for the East undoubtedly had many examples of that sort of thing. Being already a member of the literary craft, the opportunity was altogether too good to be lost, every nerve must be strained to reach the other side. It goes without saying that the Chairman of the Persuasion Committee was caught dancing an impromptu tarantelle when Miss Winchester finally told them it might, possibly might, be arranged.