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204 his capture," said Rosalie, giving me one of her intelligent looks. "You would like to arrest him without any help from outside, but are not quite sure that you could manage it. Well, then"—she turned away and began to unfasten the hood of the motor—"while you are trying to make up your mind let us see if we can't do something to correct the trouble in the carburetter."

I stepped over to lend a hand, for there was no hurry, and I liked being with Rosalie. It wasn't hard to guess at what she thought. She had me sized up as a jealous lover of Léontine's. She thought that I had been giving her a lot of guff, and was really a theatrical sort of fool who had put on a priest's hat and a soutane over my outing clothes, and had sat down in the café opposite Léontine's house to watch for whatever might happen.

But what did puzzle her, as I could see from her attitude toward me, was to determine whether I was a gentleman or merely some cheap imitation. You see, though the blood in me is about as good as you'll find, even if it never paid duty, my early education was a queer one; and though I can act the part of swell, and often have, to the point of making it mighty expensive for a critical audience, it's usually a part that I'm playing. Then my speech puzzled Rosalie, for I can talk the most affected society Parisian or the toughest La Villette argot and never change my gait. Tante Fi-Fi started me with pure French, and I'd perfected it later working society graft, and Tante Fi-Fi had been a swell in her day; the second was a sort of post-graduate course in the University of Cayenne, to which I