aware that Stafford had turned desperately white and worn. He had noticed this spent condition when he first came in, but his eyes now rediscovered it. He regarded Stafford with concern.

"Mr. Stafford," he said, "I am sure you do not realize how much below par you are. You have been under great strainI know, we all know, how hard you have worked lately. Through you, England launches her ship of war without fear of complications; but it has told on you heavily. Nothing is got without paying for it. You need rest, and you need change."

"Quite so-rest and change. I am going to have both now," said Stafford with a smile, which was forced and wan.

"You need a tonic also, and you must allow me to give you one," was the brusque professional response.

With quick movement Mappin went over to Stafford's writing-table, and threw open the cover of the blotter.

In a flash Stafford was beside him, and laid a hand upon the blotter, saying with a smile, of the kind which had so far done its work

"No, no, my friend, I will not take a tonic. It's only a good sleep I want, and I'll get that to-night. But I give my word, if I'm not all right to-morrow, if I don't sleep, I'll send to you and take your tonic gladly."

"A la bonne heure!" was the hearty response, as the door opened for the great surgeon's exit.

When the door was shut again, and Stafford was alone, he staggered over to the writing-desk. Opening the blotter, he took something up carefully and looked at it with a sardonic smile.

"You did your work all right," he said, reflectively.

It was such a needle as he had seen at Glencader in Mr. Mappin's hand. He had picked it up in Adrian Fellowes' room.

"I wonder who used you," he said in a hard voice. "I wonder who used you so well!... Was it Jasmine?"

With a trembling gesture he sat down, put the needle in a drawer, locked it, and turned round to the fire again.

"Was it Jasmine?" he repeated, and took from his pocket the letter which Lady Tynemouth had given him. For a moment he looked at it unopened-at the beautiful, smooth handwriting so familiar to his eyes; then he slowly broke the seal, and took out the closely written pages.

H

E had not begun life as such. It was his early ambition to become a railroad superintendent, and as a young clerk in the employ of a Western road he seemed headed in the right direction. He had perspicacity, application, and the disinclination to "give up," which is the formula, I have noticed, for a successful business career in America.

Then he fell into the toils of a woman. She was Katie Merritt, seventeen to his twenty, yet he was as nothing to her. She read novels, did not care for clerks, and business life held no appeal for her Katie loved artists. When he came to sit on her front steps in the summer, she wondered how he happened to be in an office when his big brother, Hudson, was an architect, and while I, who am his older sister, painted dinner-cards.

At last, stung by this sneer, he retorted that he had taken the prize in high school for crayon cubes, and once did a jar of tulips in colors. She doubted this, and he spent a Sunday away from his figuring on how to become rich, in snooping about in the attic for proof. Unfortunately, he found more than his own efforts: he found the dusty canvases of three generations of Dawsons who had thought they could paint, and who couldn't.

He was rather dreamy, for a hustling person, when he came down-stairs. "It's in the blood, isn't it?" he asked, referring to the streak of paint.

I touched up the ballet-skirt of the cardboard lady I was finishing with splashes of satanic red. "Yes, it's in the blood," I answered, grimly, "but it doesn't come out except in dinner-cards and the designing of hen-coops."

I looked up at him as he remained silent. He was very nice and long and brown, and his black eyes were softer than usual. More than that, he was my little orphan brother. "Leave the fleshpots, which are the paint-pots in our family, alone, Johnny," I advised.

But Johnny arose impatiently to go see

Katie Merritt. "Every family has to have a genius some time or other," he warned, as he made his exit. And then I really trembled, for I recognized the divine ego of artists, which is their first and their poorest attribute, and sometimes their only one.

The disintegration was rapid. A week later he was wearing a soft tie, not a real Windsor, for he was still in the office, but at least a blue-and-white polka-dot with ends that flew a little as he sold tickets to Buffalo and points farther East. It was Hudson who discovered that he was alternating his Katie evenings with evenings at the Art League.

And shortly afterward came the cataclysm. It was nothing less serious than a legacy from a far-away aunt who had painted in her youth also. But the small fortune to be divided among us was not the result of her labors. It had come from a husband who had been a plumber.

Hudson and I, with our small hoard, flew to London for a holiday; and Johnny, having reached his majority, flew after us, which was contrary to agreement. We had thought that the charms of Katie would have kept him in his Venusberg and his ticket-office until his estimate of himself grew normal. But the inheritance was too much for him, and Miss Merritt enjoyed heroic partings.

"Come back with a laurel wreath upon your brow," she had urged him. And he had assured her that he would do so.

Well, that was the beginning of our fledgling. After some Whistlerian studies of the Thames, he found Art too poor in London to remain, and he went into the ateliers of Paris.

I shall always feel that it was the stamina which would have made him a good business man which caused him to stick to this new work. He became a slave to it, and, following along these lines, he imbibed through strength rather than weakness-all of the mad

nesses of his confrères. He grew as

a

naïve as a child, as sentimental as school-girl, and as unreliable as- -well, as a painter. His will was like a piece of putty, and he was so vacillating that he couldn't make up his mind when he entered a room whether to sit down or stand up. When he did sit down it was generally on his hat or somebody else's; and when I sat down-in his studio-it was on a tube of paint or a shavingbrush.

We saw him yearly, for, by conserving our small estate, Hudson and I managed trips across to darn his socks and set him right financially. Hudson looked after his dwindling hoard, and gave forth hollow warnings now and then, which were not listened to. But it was real agony for us two failures in life to see Johnny magnificently devouring his principal, unmindful that the last meal was almost in sight.

The fifth summer we missed Europe, and spent our holiday money in establishing ourselves in New York, for the architect had gone on from chickencoops to mantelpieces for a big Eastern

firm, and as there are one million more dinners daily in New York than there are in Omaha, I argued that there would be a proportionate swelling in the demand for dinner-cards.

If we lost a glimpse of Johnny that season, we had one of Katie instead; it was my first since the breaking up of our respectable family triangle, for my enthusiasm over her had not increased with Johnny's departure. But we ran across her and her mother in New York on the day before their sailing, and took them home to tea.

Katie was Katherine now, and, to my surprise, was justly so. She was a pretty girl of twenty-two, who had found Liberty frocks unpractical, and had returned to shirt - waist suits with renewed vigor. That she was still romantic showed in the flutter of her eyelids when she spoke of seeing Johnny (John, she called him) after all these years; yet back of the flutter there was an intelligent look in her blue eyes which would suggest that what John had lost in common sense Katherine had gained.

As an entirety she was a young woman impressionable, adaptable, and brimming over with joyful anticipation of Paris-the Rue de la Paix and the Quartier Latin. John was to show her this last special feature, and, from brief postals during the summer, John did.

She told me more when she passed through again to Omaha in September. She had seen Europe, and John, and was glad she had done both. I made further subtle inquiries, and received subtler replies. Yes, he had changed-it seemed all right at the time, though-he fitted in there-oh, he was part of the perfect picture she was proud to be seen with him-over there, but somehow (she grew cloudy)-somehow she couldn't see him over here any more-no, no, he wasn't like our men.

almost forgotten Katie, and had small time to fret over the terseness of John's rare letters. To be sure he kept himself green in our memory by a steady demand for funds. At this point we received a cable. Strictly speaking, it was not for us, but was addressed to John Dawson. However, it was in my care, and, after the smallest pretense at hesitation, I opened it to see if the contents should be wired back to him. To my added perplexity I found that the despatch had been sent from the arrondissement in Paris where he lived, and the message was the potent but inexpensive word "No."

One of the most powerful matrons in society sat down to dinner the next night before a cardboard girl who had but four toes to the well-directed foot that was pointing airily to her august name. The fifth toe I forgot to do, for I was excitedly 'phoning Hudson, that I might catch him at his workshop before he started on a business trip West. Hudson agreed with me.

"He's on the water now, that's what he is. It's one of his infernal surprises." I was tremulous with the thought of seeing him again, yet we were both exasperated beyond polite utterance at the thought of his popping in on us without a word. Johnny had no plans, and couldn't understand how any one else could be bothered with them. Paris this had seemed rather amusing, but as I looked over my full calendar, for it was near Christmas-time and orders were sandwiched in with social airings on my own account, my heart went out in understanding of Katherine Merritt.

In

Six days after the cable I heard a thumping up the narrow hall that divided

our and our neighbor's apartments, the faint thrill of their bell, an exasperated slamming of their door by the maid who had opened it, and then so soft a prodding against ours that it could be likened to nothing at all. And this caused me to rise hastily, for the mode of procedure was more like the coming of Johnny than any conventional arrival; and, true to my surmising, I opened it upon a stooping figure, made gnome-like by his endeavor to read the card beneath the bell. Numerous impedimenta were in either hand, and strapped to his back were half a hundred rolls of canvas, which protuberances had been battling against our oak. By the time he had his coat off-which was a cape-there was no room to step. The unframed rolls of pictures which I had lifted from his shoulders rollicked about the floor, and the baggage was on every chair but one. On this one, however, he had put his hat, and promptly sat. Unfortunately it was a derby, quite new; and, to my amazement, Johnny was even more concerned than I as the resounding crack fore'told its destruction.

He examined it hastily. "And I'll have to wear it all the time I'm out there," he moaned.

"Out where?"

He did not reply directly, which was in line with his usual vacillation of thought. Although he answered one question with another: "But then, perhaps, I sha'n't go. Did I receive a cable?"

"You did."

"What was in it?" It was uncomfortable the way Johnny took it for granted that the despatch would be opened.

"Nothing- that is, just

'No.'"

For the smallest part of an instant he was staggered, but he cheered up immediately. "Well, 'no' doesn't mean anything. You could take it a dozen ways," was his comment. I looked at him inquiring

ly. "I'd like to tell you, sis, but it's really a great secret "; then, after waving about uncertainly, "and yet-yes-nowell, perhaps I'd better."

With some finesse I towed him into the dining-room before he began, while I continued my work at the only north window in the flat. So far, following the custom of our family, I had not displayed any emotion over my boy's coming. There was little time for that, as the cards had to go out at seven. But as I painted joyous holly wreaths I was taking stock of Johnny out of the corner of my eye with something akin to pity.

Beyond his hat, he was not looking prosperous. His clothes were those of the atelier, and were ragged, his hair was longer than it ought to be, and his shoes were the pointed ones of the French school, although American boots were to be had in Paris - for a consideration. Plainly, Johnny was recognizing the end.