it were complaining in its sleep. Sharper, and with a melancholy wail, an owl hooted. The night was still, but there was a restlessness in it, as of unknown forces which stir before they act.

After breakfast next day Nicolas came. Joy saw him first, but she remembered that it was not she who must run down the drive and open the gates for Moonlighter any more. She hurried up to the nursery, where Patch was sitting, and they sewed together all the morning.

Joy went down for lunch and saw Nicolas alone for a moment in the garden, close by the hall-door. She said, "Nick, I'm so glad!" but she felt a little breathless as she said it. She held out both her hands to him, but Nick took only one of them, and even that he dropped almost as soon as he had touched it. He looked at her He looked at her with a curious sternness without attempting to smile.

"Are you glad?" he asked. "Very well, then; so am I." And he turned away from Joy and went straight into the house.

It was perfectly easy for her to avoid Nicolas in the weeks that followed. Indeed, she had no opportunity to do anything else. Nicolas avoided her. He never looked at her or spoke to her if he could possibly help it. It made Joy feel very sad. She had believed it possible that a new love could not altogether sink an old relationship, and she had not thought it would be so difficult to have less and still keep that less alive. But this new Nicolas had no need for her at all. She seemed not to exist for him even as a shadow. Nicolas was a most kind and attentive lover. There was perhaps neither the enthusiasm nor the pride of posses

sion natural to a young man, but Nicolas was always reserved. It was not strange that he should hide his feelings, and his actions were perfectly satisfactory. He always stood by Maude's side as if he was prepared to do what she liked and enjoyed being in her presence.

They were both thorough sportsmen and they spent all their time riding, shooting, and fishing. When it was dry enough and they wanted to be at home, they played tennis valiantly on the lawn, and chaffed each other in the family circle round the tea-table.

The marriage was to be in six weeks, and Joy found her whole time and energy absorbed in helping her mother with the arrangements and finishing Maude's trousseau.

It was to be a big county wedding, and they were to have a large reception afterward. Nicolas was going to retire from the army. His father had died a few months previously, and he had become the owner of a large, rather scattered estate. Nicolas was going to be his own bailiff and keep the stag hounds for the Exmoor Hunt.

It was just the kind of life Nicolas liked, but no one would have guessed this fact from the expression his eyes had in repose. Maude was as near the height of human happiness as any mortal ever reaches. She came in and out of rooms as if she was conferring a favor by her presence, her pink face grew almost solemn with importance, and there is very little doubt she would have patronized Mrs. Featherstone if she had dared. She treated Joy as if she were a younger and wholly insignificant being, to whom Providence intended her to be benevolently disposed.

Mr. Featherstone had recovered

from the nefarious way in which he considered the engagement had taken place; he would never quite forgive Nicolas for not having married Joy, but he felt an increased appreciation for Maude because she was marrying Nicolas.

Nicolas was the most suitable match in the neighborhood, and he made, unasked, extremely handsome settlements.

"In the case of my death," Mr. Featherstone remarked with the sympathetic gloom no other subject inspired in him, "at least one of my children will be provided for."

It was a week before the marriage. Patch had gone down for her tea, but Joy still sat in the nursery, where she had been putting finishing touches to Maude's wedding dress. She was tired of sewing, but she did not want to go down to tea; she had heard people drive up and a clamor of halfstrange voices in the hall. Patch would bring her up something by and by, and when she was rested she would finish off Maude's new caps.

She went to the nursery cupboard and pulled out their old Noah's ark. Mrs. Featherstone had told her, if she thought it was in good enough repair, she might give it to the twins. There were no such Noah's arks to be found in modern toy-shops; each animal was covered with actual hair, and all were small, but beautiful, copies of the originals.

Nicolas had had a peculiar gift for mending animals, and whenever he came over to play, necks, legs, and arms recovered their natural attitudes. Joy stood the animals out one by one upon the window-sill. There was a lifelike monkey, a peacock with real peacock with real feathers on its tail, and a very large,

fat dove. Apparently the raven was missing, but a guinea-pig came out the size of a wolf. Then the giraffe appeared, whose neck Nicolas had mercifully restored to him, and it was just as she stood him up to see if he was perfectly himself that Nicolas opened the door and came in. He said:

"Oh, they told me Maude was here," and then stopped as if there was nothing more to say, looking at the animals.

He was standing by the nursery door holding the handle in his hand as if he was afraid of letting go.

"No, she is n't here," said Joy, carefully; "but, Nicolas, I'm glad it's only me. only me. I wanted to say something to you."

He came forward and stood near her, looking at the giraffe as if he was fascinated by it. His eyes for the first time since she had come back did not look hard.

"These are our old animals, you know," said Joy after a pause. "Do you remember the peacock's tail? You helped me dye the feathers blue when the old ones came off, and Rosemary cried."

"I remember," said Nicolas in a curious, dry voice.

"I can't find the zebra," Joy went on a little breathlessly. "Can you think what happened to it?"

"I think we buried it in the garden under the pink may-tree," said Nicolas, "as a sin offering, because we liked it the best and had stolen old Honeyman's apples. I don't remember unburying it."

Nicolas knelt down by the windowseat and pulled out of the ark a chicken the same size as a spotted leopard with which it had got inextricably mixed.

"This fellow's leg is n't right," he said unsteadily. "Have you any glue?"

Joy found some on a shelf, and Nicolas very carefully set to work upon the leopard's leg.

"What was it you wanted to say to me?" he asked without raising his head.

"Oh, nothing really," Joy explained; "nothing now. I was rather upset before, because you were n't friendly to me, Nicolas, and I-you see, I thought I was coming home"

Nicolas bent lower over the leopard's leg.

"What d' you mean?" he asked. "You are home, are n't you?"

"Not if you 're not friendly," said Joy, quickly. She knew now what she had wanted to say to him. "You see, Nick dear, when the boys marry, I sha'n't lose them. Why, I could n't bear it, could I, not to go on being their sister? And I don't see why I should n't keep you in the same way. You have always been one of the boys, Nick."

Nicolas put down the leopard, abruptly.

"I've heard from Julia," he said, and without a word of warning he buried his hard head in Joy's lap and burst into sobs.

Joy knew that Nick never cried, not even when he was only eight years old and broke his wrist jumping. His breath came in great gasps, as if he were running a race and had been beaten. Joy put both her hands over his head and bent over him.

"I've been a fool, my dear," he said at last, "and I 've got to go on being a fool. That 's all there is to it. You'd have done what I asked you if I'd waited. That 's what Julia told me. I suppose it's true?"

"O Nick," she said, "she ought n't to have told you-not now. It is n't any use, is it? I'd do anything in the world you wanted always-except hurt Maude."

"Yes," he said without turning toward her; "but that's the point, is n't it? The only thing I want would hurt Maude. But we may as well have the whole thing out now, anyhow. I thought when I asked you that time it was me you minded,-my being your lover, I mean,-but Julia says it was n't. She says you were afraid because of Rosemary, and having a kid that might be ill, and that you 'd have got over it, and that, anyway, you liked me for myself. Don't mind telling me the truth now. I'll do just what you wish. I'll always do what you wish, but I want to know."

"O Nick," said Joy, "I thought you knew what I meant then. It is n't any use my saying it. Oh, but of course I liked you."

"Enough to marry me?" Nick persisted.

"Enough for anything in the world," said Joy, firmly.

Nicolas said nothing for a long time; then he said in a low voice:

"I suppose you would n't let me kiss you once?"

Joy hung her head miserably. She wanted to kiss him, her arms ached to

Nicolas, after a minute or two, got up and stood with his back to her, looking out of the window.

take his pain into her very being; but even if she took it, she could not keep it. He would have to take it away with him in the end, and some instinct told

OULD to Heaven that every pair of men and women could know the privilege of the illuminating sort of experience that was Jack's and mine during the six months before our marriage! By virtue of strenuous work and play together, by our wedding date in November there was little of which we did not have a fair inkling as concerned each other's temperament and idiosyncrasies. For the most part the study was smooth sailing, though sometimes it was an adventure beset by snags.

Jack always pleaded not guilty to the passion of jealousy, despising and deriding it as a low, animal trait, which it indubitably is. With an exceptional capacity for tolerance toward almost every human weakness save disloyalty, he could not harbor any sympathy with that calamity of the ages, sheer animal jealousy.

"Should you turn from me to another man if I could not make you happy, I'd give that man to you on a silver platter, my dear," he would declare, "and say, 'Bless you, my children!' But I don't believe I could send you on a silver platter to another manquite."

What better place than this further to interpret Jack London's relation toward women? I, who have known the clasp of his soul, known him at his highest, can yet withdraw from that fellowship and regard his mascu

linity objectively. Asking my reader to bear in mind earlier manifestations of his philosophy and emotions toward the little women of his adolescence, I want to record some of the aspects of his mature attitude.

He was not prone to allow women to interfere with the business of life and adventure. He liked to think of himself as in Augustus's class-a man that women could not make or mar. In short, he was not a man who lost his head easily. "God's own mad lover dying on a kiss" was an appealing line to his sense of poesy, but Jack preferred to live, rather than die, on that kiss. Love, in brief, should be a warm, but normal, passion that made for fuller living. At one period, after soaking himself in a vast accumulation of erotic literature, pro and con, he told me that he felt himself lucky to have been born so rightly balanced physically that no abnormalities of his early rough days, or contact with the decadences of super-civilization, had touched him to his hurt. The alienists interested him intellectually, but he was nicely averse to abnormality of any stripe.

8 2

I had supposed that there would be little of the proprietary in the regard of so broad-minded an individualist. One of my own most vital surprises was to find that Jack was just as adorably medieval as any other lover in this