"Why, if you give 'em hokum they don't even demand acting. Look at our own star, Mercer. You know as well as I do that she not only can't act, but she's merely a beautiful moron. In a world where right prevailed she'd be crowned queen of the morons without question. She may have an idea that two and two make four, but if she has it's only because she believes everything she hears. And look at the mail she gets. Every last one of the twenty million has written to tell her what a noble actress she is. She even believes that.

"Baird can keep on with the burlesque stuff, but his little old two-reelers'll probably have to pay for it, especially if he keeps those high-priced people. I'll bet that one new man of his sets him back seven hundred and fifty a week. The Lord knows he's worth every cent of it. My boy, tell me, did you ever in all your life see a lovelier imitation of a perfectly rotten actor? There's an artist for you. Who is he, anyway? Where'd he come from?" Merton Gill again listened; he was merely affecting to busy himself with a fork. It was good acting.

"I don't know," replied Henshaw. "Some of the crowd last night said he was just an extra that Baird dug up on the lot here. And, on the subject of burlesque, they also said Baird was having him do some Edgar Wayne stuff in a new one."

"Fine!" The Governor beamed. "Can't you see him as the honest, likable country boy? I bet he'll be good to his old mother in this one, too, and get the best of the city slickers in the end. For heaven's sake don't let me miss it! This kid last night handed me laughs that were better than a month's vacation for this old carcass of mine. You say he was just an extra?"

"That's what I heard last night. Anyway, he's all you say he is as an artist. Where do you suppose he got it? Do you suppose he's just the casual genius that comes along from time to time? And why didn't he stay 'straight' instead of playing horse with the sacred traditions of our art? That's what troubled me as I watched him. Even in that wild business with the spurs he was the artist every second. He must have tricked those falls but I couldn't catch him at it. Why should such a man tie up with Baird?"

"Ask me something hard. I'd say this bird had been tried out in serious stuff and couldn't make the grade. That's the way he struck me. Probably he once thought he could play Hamlet—one of those boys. Didn't you get the real pathos he'd turn on now and then? He actually had me kind of teary a couple of times. But I could see he'd also make me laugh my head off any time he showed in a straight piece.

"To begin with, look at that low-comedy face of his. And then—something peculiar—even while he's imitating a bad actor you feel somehow that it isn't all imitation. It's art, I grant you, but you feel he'd still be a bad actor if he'd try to imitate a good one. Somehow he found out his limits and decided to be what God meant him to be. Does that answer you? It gives you acting-plus, and if that isn't the plus in this case I miss my guess."

"I suppose you're right—something like that. And of course the real pathos is there. It has to be. There never was a great comedian without it, and this one is great. I admit that, and I admit all you say about our audience. I suppose we can't ever sell to twenty million people a day pictures that make any demand on the human intelligence. But couldn't we sell something better to one million—or a few thousand?"

The Governor dropped his cigarette end into the dregs of his coffee. "We might," he said, "if we were endowed. As it is, to make pictures we must make money. To make money we must sell to the mob. And the mob reaches full mental bloom at the age of fifteen. It won't buy pictures the average child can't get."

"Of course the art is in its infancy," remarked Henshaw, discarding his own cigarette.

"Ours is the Peter Pan of the arts," announced the Governor, as he rose.

"The Peter Pan of the arts—"

"Yes. I trust you recall the outstanding biological freakishness of Peter."

"Oh!" replied Henshaw.

When Merton Gill dared to glance up a moment later the men were matching coins at the counter. When they went out he left a half-eaten meal and presently might have been observed on a swift-rolling street-car. He mumbled as he blankly surveyed palm-bordered building sites along the way. He was again rehearsing a tense scene with the Montague girl. In actor parlance he was giving himself all the best of it. But they were new lines he mumbled over and over. And he was no longer eluded by the title of that book he remembered on the library shelf at Simsbury. Sitting in the cafeteria listening to strange talk, lashed by cruel memories, it had flashed upon his vision with the stark definition of a screened subtitle. He rang the Montague bell twice before he heard a faint summons to enter. Upon the parlour couch, under blankets that reached her pillowed head, lay Sarah. She was pale and seemed to suffer. She greeted him in a feeble voice, lids fluttering over the fires of that mysterious fever burning far back in her eyes.

"Hullo, Kid," he began brightly. "Here's your watch." Her doubting glance hovered over him as he smiled down at her. "You giving it to me again, Merton?" She seemed unable to conquer a stubborn incredulity.

"Of course I'm giving it to you again. What'd you think I was going to do?"

She still surveyed him with little veiled glances. "You look so bright you give me Kleig eyes," she said. She managed a wan smile at this.

"Take it," he insisted, extending the package. "Of course it won't keep Western Union time, but it'll look good on you."

She appeared to be gaining on her incredulity, but a vestige of it remained. "I won't touch it," she declared with more spirit than could have been expected from the perishing, "I won't touch it till you give me a good big kiss."

"Sure," he said, and leaned down to brush her pale cheek with his lips. He was cheerfully businesslike in this ceremony.

"Not till you do it right," she persisted. He knelt beside the couch and did it right. He lingered with a hand upon her pale brow.

"What you afraid of?" he demanded.

"You," she said, but now she again brought the watch to view, holding it away from her, studying its glitter from various angles. At last she turned her eyes up to his. They Were alive but unrevealing. "Well?"

"Well?" he repeated coolly.

"Oh, stop it!" Again there was more energy than the moribund are wont to manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone as she went on, "You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you know well enough what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can't you?"

He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.

"Well, it'll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s'pose you and Baird had it between you all the time, right down to the very last, that I thought he was doin' a serious play. Ho, ho!" He laughed gibingly. It was a masterful laugh. "A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!" Again the dry, scornful laugh of superiority. "Didn't you people know that I knew what I could do and what I couldn't do? I should have thought that little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn't you s'pose I knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn't ever make the grade in a serious piece?

"Of course I know I got real pathos—look how I turned it on a couple o' times in that piece last night—but even when I'm imitating a bad actor you can see it ain't all acting. You'd see soon enough I was a bad actor if I tried to imitate a good one. I guess you'd see that pretty quick. Didn't you and Baird even s'pose I'd found out my limits and decided to be what God meant me to be?

"But I got the pathos all right, and you can't name one great comedian that don't need pathos more'n he needs anything else. He just has to have it—and I got it. I got acting-plus; that's what, I got. I knew it all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it last night. You could hear fifty of 'em talking about it when I came out of the theatre, saying I was an artist and all like that, and a certain Los Angeles society woman that you can bet never says things she don't mean, she told me she saw lots of places in this piece that I was funnier than any cross-eyed man that ever lived. And what happens this morning?" Hands in pockets he swaggered to and fro past the couch.

"Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to sign me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of 'em said not an hour ago—he's a big producer, too—that Baird ought to be paying me seven hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of course I didn't want to say anything the other day, with you pretending to know so much about contracts and all that—I just thought I'd let you go on, seeing you were so smart—and I signed what you told me to. But I know I should have held off—with this Bamberger coming over from the Bigart when I was hardly out of bed, and says will three hundred and fifty a week interest me and promising he'll give me a chance to do that spur act again that was the hit of the piece—"

He broke off, conscious suddenly that the girl had for some time been holding a most peculiar stare rigidly upon him. She had at first narrowed her right eye at a calculating angle as she listened; but for a long time now the eyes had been widened to this inexplicable stare eloquent of many hidden things.

As he stopped his speech, made ill at ease by the incessant pressing of the look, he was caught and held by it to a longer silence than he had meant to permit. He could now read meanings. That unflinching look incurred by his smooth bluster was a telling blend of pity and of wonder.

"So you know, do you," she demanded, "that you look just enough too much like Harold Parmalee so that you're funny? I mean." she amended, seeing him wince, "that you look the way Parmalee would look if he had brains?"

He faltered but made a desperate effort to recover his balance.

"And besides, what difference does it make? If we did good pictures we'd have to sell 'em to a mob. And what's a mob? It's fifteen years old and nothing but admirers, or something like that, like Muriel Mercer that wouldn't know how much are two times two if the neighbours didn't get it to her—"

Again he had run down under her level look. As he stopped, the girl on the couch who had lain with the blankets to her neck suddenly threw them aside and sat up. Surprisingly she was not garbed in sick-bed apparel. She seemed to be fully dressed.

A long moment she sat thus, regarding him still with that slow look, unbelieving yet cherishing. His eyes fell at last.

"Merton!" he heard her say. He looked up but she did not speak. She merely gave a little knowing nod of the head and opened her arms to him. Quickly he knelt beside her while the mothering arms enfolded him. A hand pulled his head to her breast and held it there. Thus she rocked gently, the hand gliding up to smooth his hair. Without words she cherished him thus a long time. The gentle rocking back and forth continued.

"It's—it's like that other time you found me—" His bluster had gone. He was not sure of his voice. Even these few words had been hard. He did not try more.

"There, there, there!" she whispered. "It's all right, everything's all right. Your mother's got you right here and she ain't ever going to let you go—never going to let you go."

She was patting his head in rhythm with her rocking as she snuggled and soothed him. There was silence for another interval. Then she began to croon a song above him as she rocked, though the lyric was plainly an improvisation.

"Did he have his poor old mother going for a minute? Yes, he did. He had her going for a minute, for a minute. Yes, he had her going good for a minute.

"But oh, he won't ever fool her very long, very long, not very long, because he can't fool his dear old mother very long, very long; and he can bet on that, bet on that, so he can, bet a lot of money on that, that, that!" Her charge had grown still again, but she did not relax her tightened arms.

"Say," he said at last.

"Well, honey."

"You know those benches where we wait for the cars?"

"Do I know them?" The imperative inference was that she did.

"I looked at the store yesterday. The sign down there says 'Himebaugh's dignified system of deferred payments.'"

"Yes, yes, I know."

"Well, I saw another good place—it says 'The house of lucky rings'—you know—rings!"

"Sure, I know. That's all right."

"Well," he threw off the arms and got to his feet. She stood up then.

"Well, all right!"

They were both constrained now. Both affected an ease that neither felt. It seemed to be conceded without words that they must very lightly skirt the edges of Merton Gill's screen art. They talked a long tune volubly of other things: of the girl's illness from which she now seemed most happily to have recovered, of whether she was afraid of him—she professed still to be—of the new watch whose beauties were newly admired when it had been adjusted to its owner's wrist; of finances they talked, and even, quite simply, of accessible homes where two could live as cheaply as one.

It was not until he was about to go, when he stood at the door while the girl readjusted his cravat, smoothed his hair, and administered a final series of pats where they seemed most needed, that he broke ever so slightly through the reserve which both had felt congealing about a certain topic.

"You know," he said, "I happened to remember the title of a book this morning; a book I used to see back in the public library at home. It wasn't one I ever read. Maybe Tessie Kearns read it. Anyway, she had a poem she likes a lot written by the same man. She used to read me good parts of it. But I never read the book because the title sounded kind of wild, like there couldn't be any such thing. The poem had just a plain name; it was called 'Lucile,' but the book by the same man was called 'The Tragic Comedians.' You wouldn't think there could be a tragic comedian would you?—well, look at me."

She looked at him, with that elusive, remote flickering back in her eyes, but she only said, "Be sure and come take me out to dinner. To-night I can eat. And don't forget your overcoat. And listen—don't you dare go into Himebaugh's till I can go with you."

One minute after he had gone the Montague girl was at the telephone.

"Hello! Mr. Baird, please. Is this Mr. Baird? Well, Jeff, everything's jake. Yeah. The poor thing was pretty wild when he got here. First he began to bluff. He'd got an earful from someone, probably over on the lot. And he put it over on me for a minute, too. But he didn't last good. He was awful broke up when the end came. Bless his heart. But you bet I kissed the hurt place and made it well. How about him now? Jeff, I'm darned if I can tell except he's right again. When he got here he was some heart-broke and some mad and some set up on account of things he hears about himself. I guess he's that way still, except I mended the heart-break. I can't quite make him out—he's like a book where you can't guess what's coming in the next chapter, so you keep on reading. I can see we ain't ever going to talk much about it—not if we live together twenty years. What's that? Yeah. Didn't I tell you he was always getting me, somehow? Well, now I'm got. Yeah. We're gonna do an altar walk. What? Oh, right away. Say, honest, Jeff, I'll never have an easy minute again while he's out of my sight. Helpless! You said it. Thanks, Jeff. I know that, old man. Good-by!"



CHAPTER XX. ONWARD AND UPWARD

At the first showing of the Buckeye company's new five-reel comedy—Five Reels-500 Laughs—entitled Brewing Trouble, two important members of its cast occupied balcony seats and one of them throughout the piece brazenly applauded the screen art of her husband. "I don't care who sees me," she would reply ever and again to his whispered protests.

The new piece proved to be a rather broadly stressed burlesque of the type of picture drama that has done so much to endear the personality of Edgar Wayne to his public. It was accorded a hearty reception. There was nothing to which it might be compared save the company's previous Hearts on Fire, and it seemed to be felt that the present offering had surpassed even that masterpiece of satire.

The Gills, above referred to, watched the unwinding celluloid with vastly different emotions. Mrs. Gill was hearty in her enjoyment, as has been indicated. Her husband, superficially, was not displeased. But beneath that surface of calm approval—beneath even the look of bored indifference he now and then managed—there still ran a complication of emotions, not the least of which was honest bewilderment. People laughed, so it must be funny. And it was good to be known as an artist of worth, even if the effects of your art were unintended.

It was no shock to him to learn now that the mechanical appliance in his screen-mother's kitchen was a still, and that the grape juice the honest country boy purveyed to the rich New Yorker had been improved in rank defiance of a constitutional amendment. And even during the filming of the piece he had suspected that the little sister, so engagingly played by the present Mrs. Gill, was being too bold. With slight surprise, therefore, as the drama unfolded, he saw that she had in the most brazen manner invited the attentions of the city villains.

She had, in truth, been only too eager to be lured to the great city with all its pitfalls, and had bidden the old home farewell in her simple country way while each of the villains in turn had awaited her in his motor-car. What Merton had not been privileged to watch were the later developments of this villainy. For just beyond the little hamlet at a lonely spot in the road each of the motor-cars had been stopped by a cross-eyed gentleman looking much like the clerk in the hotel, save that he was profusely bewhiskered and bore side-arms in a menacing fashion.

Declaring that no scoundrel could take his little daughter from him, he deprived the villains of their valuables, so that for a time at least they should not bring other unsuspecting girls to grief. As a further precaution he compelled them to abandon their motor-cars, in which he drove off with the rescued daughter. He was later seen to sell the cars at a wayside garage, and, after dividing their spoils with his daughter, to hail a suburban trolley upon which they both returned to the home nest, where the little girl would again languish at the gate, a prey to any designing city man who might pass.

She seemed so defenceless in her wild-rose beauty, her longing for pretty clothes and city ways, and yet so capably pro by this opportune father who appeared to foresee the moment of her flights.

He learned without a tremor that among the triumphs of his inventive genius had been a machine for making ten—dollar bills, at which the New York capitalist had exclaimed that the state right for Iowa alone would bring one hundred thousand dollars. Even more remunerative, it would seem, had been his other patent—the folding boomerang. The manager of the largest boomerang factory in Australia stood ready to purchase this device for ten million dollars. And there was a final view of the little home after prosperity had come to its inmates so long threatened with ruin. A sign over the door read "Ye Olde Fashioned Gifte Shoppe," and under it, flaunted to the wayside, was the severely simple trade-device of a high boot.

These things he now knew were to be expected among the deft infamies of a Buckeye comedy. But the present piece held in store for him a complication that, despite his already rich experience of Buckeye methods, caused him distressing periods of heat and cold while he watched its incredible unfolding. Early in the piece, indeed, he had begun to suspect in the luring of his little sister a grotesque parallel to the bold advances made him by the New York society girl. He at once feared some such interpretation when he saw himself coy and embarrassed before her down-right attack, and he was certain this was intended when he beheld himself embraced by this reckless young woman who behaved in the manner of male screen idols during the last dozen feet of the last reel. But how could he have suspected the lengths to which a perverted spirit of satire would lead the Buckeye director?

For now he staggered through the blinding snow, a bundle clasped to his breast. He fell, half fainting, at the door of the old home. He groped for the knob and staggered in to kneel at his mother's feet. And she sternly repulsed him, a finger pointing to the still open door.

Unbelievably the screen made her say, "He wears no ring. Back to the snow with 'em both! Throw 'em Way Down East!"

And Baird had said the bundle would contain one of his patents!

Mrs. Gill watched this scene with tense absorption. When the mother's iron heart had relented she turned to her husband. "You dear thing, that was a beautiful piece of work. You're set now. That cinches your future. Only, dearest, never, never, never let it show on your face that you think it's funny. That's all you'll ever have to be afraid of in your work."

"I won't," he said stoutly.

He shivered—or did he shudder?—and quickly reached to take her hand. It was a simple, direct gesture, yet somehow it richly had the quality of pleading.

"Mother understands," she whispered. "Only remember, you mustn't seem to think it's funny."

"I won't," he said again. But in his torn heart he stubbornly cried, "I don't, I don't!"

* * * * * * *

Some six months later that representative magazine, Silver Screenings, emblazoned upon its front cover a promise that in the succeeding number would appear a profusely illustrated interview by Augusta Blivens with that rising young screen actor, Merton Gill.

The promise was kept. The interview wandered amid photographic reproductions of the luxurious Hollywood bungalow, set among palms and climbing roses, the actor and his wife in their high-powered roadster (Mrs. Gill at the wheel); the actor in his costume of chaps and sombrero, rolling a cigarette; the actor in evening dress, the actor in his famous scene of the Christmas eve return in Brewing Trouble; the actor regaining his feet in his equally famous scene of the malignant spurs; the actor and his young wife, on the lawn before the bungalow, and the young wife aproned, in her kitchen, earnestly busy with spoon and mixing bowl.

"It is perhaps not generally known," wrote Miss Blivens, "that the honour of having discovered this latest luminary in the stellar firmament should be credited to Director Howard Henshaw of the Victor forces. Indeed, I had not known this myself until the day I casually mentioned the Gills in his presence. I lingered on a set of Island Love, at present being filmed by this master of the unspoken drama, having but a moment since left that dainty little reigning queen of the celluloid dynasty, Muriel Mercer. Seated with her in the tiny bijou boudoir of her bungalow dressing room on the great Holden lot, its walls lined with the works of her favourite authors—for one never finds this soulful little girl far from the books that have developed her mentally as the art of the screen has developed her emotionally—she had referred me to the director when I sought further details of her forthcoming great production, an idyl of island romance and adventure. And presently, when I had secured from him the information I needed concerning this unique little drama of the great South Seas, I chanced to mention my approaching encounter with the young star of the Buckeye forces, an encounter to which I looked forward with some dismay.

"Mr. Henshaw, pausing in his task of effecting certain changes in the interior of the island hut, reassured me. 'You need have no fear about your meeting with Gill,' he said. 'You will find him quite simple and unaffected, an artist, and yet sanely human.' It was now that he revealed his own part in the launching of this young star. 'I fancy it is not generally known,' he continued, 'that to me should go the honour of having "discovered" Gill. It is a fact, however. He appeared as an extra one morning in the cabaret scene we used in Miss Mercer's tremendous hit, The Blight of Broadway. Instantly, as you may suppose, I was struck by the extraordinary distinction of his face and bearing. In that crowd composed of average extra people he stood out to my eye as one made for big things. After only a moment's chat with him I gave him a seat at the edge of the dancing floor and used him most effectively in portraying the basic idea of this profoundly stirring drama in which Miss Mercer was to achieve one of her brightest triumphs.

"'Watch that play to-day; you will discover young Gill in many of the close-ups where, under my direction, he brought out the psychological, the symbolic—if I may use the term—values of the great idea underlying our story. Even in these bits he revealed the fine artistry which he has since demonstrated more broadly under another director.

"'To my lasting regret the piece was then too far along to give him a more important part, though I intended to offer him something good in our next play for Muriel Mercer—you may recall her gorgeous success in Her Father's Wife—but I was never able to find the chap again. I made inquiries, of course, and felt a really personal sense of loss when I could get no trace of him. I knew then, as well as I know now, that he was destined for eminence in our world of painted shadows. You may imagine my chagrin later when I learned that another director was to reap the rewards of a discovery all my own.'

"And so," continued Miss Blivens, "it was with the Henshaw words still in my ears that I first came into the presence of Merton Gill, feeling that he would-as he at once finely did—put me at my ease. Simple, unaffected, modest, he is one whom success has not spoiled. Both on the set where I presently found him—playing the part of a titled roue in the new Buckeye comedy—to be called, one hears, 'Nearly Sweethearts or Something'-and later in the luxurious but homelike nest which the young star has provided for his bride of a few months-she was 'Flips' Montague, one recalls, daughter of a long line of theatrical folk dating back to days of the merely spoken drama-he proved to be finely unspoiled and surprisingly unlike the killingly droll mime of the Buckeye constellation. Indeed one cannot but be struck at once by the deep vein of seriousness underlying the comedian's surface drollery. His sense of humour must be tremendous; and yet only in the briefest flashes of his whimsical manner can one divine it.

"'Let us talk only of my work,' he begged me. 'Only that can interest my public.' And so, very seriously, we talked of his work.

"'Have you ever thought of playing serious parts?' I asked, being now wholly put at my ease by his friendly, unaffected ways.

"He debated a moment, his face rigidly set, inscrutable to my glance. Then he relaxed into one of those whimsically appealing smiles that somehow are acutely eloquent of pathos. 'Serious parts—with this low-comedy face of mine!' he responded. And my query had been answered. Yet he went on, 'No, I shall never play Hamlet. I can give a good imitation of a bad actor but, doubtless, I should give a very bad imitation of a good one.

"Et vailet, Messieurs." I remarked to myself. The man with a few simple strokes of the brush had limned me his portrait. And I was struck again with that pathetic appeal in face and voice as he spoke so confidingly. After all, is not pure pathos the hall-mark of great comedy? We laugh, but more poignantly because our hearts are tugged at. And here was a master of the note pathetic.

"Who that has roared over the Gill struggle with the dreadful spurs was not even at the climax of his merriment sympathetically aware of his earnest persistence, the pained sincerity of his repeated strivings, the genuine anguish distorting his face as he senses the everlasting futility of his efforts? Who that rocked with laughter at the fox-trot lesson in Object, Alimony, could be impervious to the facial agony above those incompetent, disobedient, heedless feet?

"Here was honest endeavour, an almost prayerful determination, again and again thwarted by feet that recked not of rhythm or even of bare mechanical accuracy. Those feet, so apparently aimless, so little under control, were perhaps the most mirthful feet the scored failure in the dance. But the face, conscious of their clumsiness, was a mask of fine tragedy.

"Such is the combination, it seems to me, that has produced the artistry now so generally applauded, an artistry that perhaps achieved its full flowering in that powerful bit toward the close of Brewing Trouble—the return of the erring son with his agony of appeal so markedly portrayed that for the moment one almost forgot the wildly absurd burlesque of which it formed the joyous yet truly emotional apex. I spoke of this.

"'True burlesque is, after all, the highest criticism, don't you think?' he asked me. 'Doesn't it make demands which only a sophisticated audience can meet-isn't it rather high-brow criticism?' And I saw that he had thought deeply about his art.

"'It is because of this,' he went on, 'that we must resort to so much of the merely slap-stick stuff in our comedies. For after all, our picture audience, twenty million people a day—surely one can make no great demands upon their intelligence.' He considered a moment, seemingly lost in memories of his work. 'I dare say,' he concluded, 'there are not twenty million people of taste and real intelligence in the whole world.'

"Yet it must not be thought that this young man would play the cynic. He is superbly the optimist, though now again he struck a note of almost cynic whimsicality. 'Of course our art is in its infancy—' He waited for my nod of agreement, then dryly added, 'We must, I think, consider it the Peter Pan of the arts. And I dare say you recall the outstanding biological freakishness of Peter.' But a smile—that slow, almost puzzled smile of his—accompanied the words.

"'You might,' he told me at parting, 'call me the tragic comedian.' And again I saw that this actor is set apart from the run of his brethren by an almost uncanny gift for introspection. He has ruthlessly analysed himself. He knows, as he put it, 'what God meant him to be.' Was here a hint of poor Cyrano?

"I left after some brief reference to his devoted young wife, who, in studio or home, is never far from his side. "'It is true that I have struggled and sacrificed to give the public something better and finer,' he told me then; 'but I owe my real success all to her.' He took the young wife's hand in both his own, and very simply, unaffectedly, raised it to his cheek where he held it a moment, with that dreamy, remembering light in his eyes, as of one striving to recall bits of his past.

"'I think that's all,' he said at last. But on the instant of my going he checked me once more. 'No, it isn't either.' He brightened. 'I want you to tell your readers that this little woman is more than my wife—she is my best pal; and, I may also add, my severest critic.'"

THE END