things, always thinking of something to eat, half crazy to wolf down the whole basket of little fat pink and green cakes he was passing. Why, it was almost as if he were possessed by an evil spirit when she was near, a beastly animal something. As if he were possessed by the spirit of a pig! "Now when she had given them the cup and they had drunk it off, presently she smote them with a wand, and in the sties of the swine she penned them. So they had the head and voice, the bristles and the shape of swine, but their minds abode even as of old."

Circe! A thought so awful that it must not even be whispered in the secret gray places of his innermost mind. Stifle it, muffle it, slam the doors of his brain, bury his head in the pillows of oblivion. Circe. Circe. His own mother! She had woven a strange and evil spell about him. To her, to his stepfather, perhaps even to all these eating, laughing, vivid people, he had "the head, the voice, the bristles, and the shape of a swine." He must get away, out of this cursed merry-go-round of talk and colors and laughter, out where he could be alone and think.

22

It takes a lot of thinking to adjust and assimilate an idea such as Derek's. It had taken all afternoon, and even after supper he felt that he had not begun to get it straightened out in his mind yet. He was lying on his bed, having dined frugally on an anchovy hors d'œuvre, a small discouraged omelet, and a bit of salad left over from lunch. A hurried maid had brought it up to his room only after he had gone into the rear regions of the house and shouted down

vistas of long dark stairs: "Hi, what about my supper? Make it snappy.' So eventually it had come, and the maid had hurried down again to the making of more hors d'œuvre for the cocktail party now arriving in gusts of distant mirth; and Derek had eaten his meal in three minutes, and shoved the tray aside on his bureau and was lying on his bed trying not to think of Thanksgiving dinners and Sundays in the old days before his father had gone.

Miss Garfield had kept house then, a kindly dry old Englishwoman, daughter of a mid-Victorian clergyman. She had been the governess in Derek's father's family, and she believed that children should be wellfed with good roast beef and green mounds of spinach and baked potatoes, fluffy and smoking hot. John Pyne had liked that sort of food too; none of your foolish little dishes of lobstery things for him. Derek could see him standing carving a Thanksgiving turkey. A tall, bronze-haired, kindly man slicing the white pieces adroitly. "Want the drumstick, Derek, my boy? Dressing? Pass Derek the cranberry sauce, Katie. How about some dressing for Sonia? No? Don't believe it would hurt her. Tuck it in Derek. You'll need all the brawn you can get for foot-ball." There had been lots of good honest vegetables too in those days, beans and turnips and round white creamy onions to make your mouth water. His mother hadn't liked it, any of it. She called those meals "Teutonic orgies" and had sat at her end of the table, silent, beautiful, smiling that strange ironic little smile of hers, thinking-what?

But now Derek knew what his,

father had meant in that last talk together. "I've got to go off, my boy. I don't make your mother happy. I'm not the sort she wants. She'd like to turn me into a lounge lizard" -his jaw had set-"and if that's the type she wants-why it's the type she wants. I'll go off, and she'll get a divorce for desertion. I've made the house over to her, and of course I couldn't take you kids away from her. You'll be in school most of the time anyway. It's not easy, but life's not easy, ever. We've just got to stand it and be as decent as we can."

So that was that, and his mother had tried to change his father into a lounge lizard, just as Derek was being changed into a swine. And Will Court, what was he like? He had seemed a decent enough chap when their mother first married him, a little silly perhaps; but in the last year he'd grown irritable and nervous as one of these lynxes you see in a cage. Lean, restless, ready to rip you up at the slightest chance. And all the other people who crowded the place for teas and bridge and dinners and cocktail parties, the new "swift" crowd his father had never known, what a lot of them were like animals too! There was a reddish brownhaired woman like a chipmunk and a jowled man like a boar and two or three women like panthers and a little fat man like a prairie-dog. John Pyne had been wise to realize his danger and escape. Circe, tall and fair and lovely, waving a wand over a bronze-haired man with a tall spear and a shield, and a leopard's skin about him; and the man sinking, shriveling, changing into scaly green limbs, and a flat wicked green head, and a long flickering tongue, a great

green lizard slithering, frightened, with a dry scraping sound over the rocks into the "wine-dark sea." Horrible picture!

Derek shuddered and sat up, thinking he must have dozed on the bed, wondering why he felt so weak and sick and why his heavy oak furniture seemed so unusually misty in the dusk. He'd just have to have something more to eat.

There he was again thinking about food. Perhaps he was going batty. There were the Gadarene swine. But, no, an evil spirit had gone into them out of a man. Still, couldn't the spirit of a swine go into a man just as well-couldn't one reverse it, perhaps? There was a big fat pig over in the old Reed farm-yard. No-goshthe kids had told him the other day it had died. Maybe its spirit had slipped into his body. "Gosh, I am going clean off my bean," he thought and found himself saying it aloud and, in a panic, fled out of his room and ran softly down-stairs.

Below, there were lights, and laughter, and cars arriving at the front door. He caught a glimpse of his stepfather's thin back and his mother's fair smooth hair as she stood in the hallway. Then he slipped into the dark of the sewing-room and out of a window. There was a clear white piece of a moon lying on its back in the sky above him. He climbed down a trellis, feeling for precarious footing among the honeysuckle. Its fragrance surrounded him achingly. His father used to love it. Well, he'd go out to the garden and pull up a few carrots and perhaps find some tomatoes. Pretty poor eating without salt, but better than nothing.

In the garden, the vegetables were wet with dew, and he crouched in the dark rows and tried to pull up the roots, but it was not easy. Wind sighed through a pine-tree beyond the corn-rows, and a rabbit or something scuttled, terrified, into the darkness. There were smells of pine and grass and sea and clover and carrots, and it was cool and full of peace. Back toward the house long lights of cars pierced the blackness of the driveway.

22

Then, incredibly, there was a shot— a woman screamed, and then silence. Then turmoil, cars going forward, backing, people running out of the house, excited cries, confused by the distance.

As he ran, breathless, over the soft damp grass toward the house, he saw something move beneath a syringabush by the driveway. If some one were hiding there he'd soon rout him

out.

"Get out of there," he ordered, never thinking it might be wiser to go to the house for help, and a small terrified voice answered:

"Oh, Derek-I didn't mean to shoot him. Do you suppose he's dead. Don't say he's dead, Derek. We only borrowed the revolver from Michael's room in the garage.'

So the kids had been at the bottom

of it.

"Come out, you two," he commanded; and Charley and Sonia, alarmed and dejected, crawled out from beneath the bush.

"We thought it would be fun to be brigands," Sonia explained tearfully. "Charley never meant to hit him, Derek, truly. He didn't know it was loaded." Even now they didn't see

the possibilities of horror. And Charley was holding a revolver as if it were a toy. Good gosh! What awful thing had the child done?

"Give me that gun," Derek ordered. "If you've killed anybody, Charley, it'll be a sweet mess. Bunk up to the house now and climb trellis quick."

up the

"How about these Derek?" Sonia asked meekly, and held out—a string of pearls, cloudy white in the thin moonlight. "They're Mrs. Justin Baningway's."

"For Pete's sake! You young fools! Here comes some one. Beat it, beat it.”

Two small shadows fled across the darkness of the lawn, and Derek found himself standing with a revolver in one hand and Mrs. Justin Baningway's pearls in the other. "Good gosh!" he thought and dropped the revolver in a pocket not occupied by carrots. "I'll have to give these darn pearls back to her right away. If she isn't dead she'll be crazy." He walked on up toward the house.

If he had only thought, he might have avoided it, but it never occurred to him. How could it occur to him? He walked up to the house intending to hand over the pearls to his mother and say something about having found them on the driveway. Then he would go on up to his room and eat his carrots and go to bed. But when he got to the front door there were a lot of people talking excitedly, explaining to a motorcycle policeman, who got off his cycle and pushed his way in ahead of Derek. The hall seemed jammed with men and women; and, oddly, the Baningways' chauffeur was sit

ting on the stairs, and some woman in a silvery shimmery dress was bathing the man's bare arm with cotton and water, and the arm was bleeding bright red blood into a green bowl a man in a dinner-jacket was holding. The officer was trying to find out what had happened, and Mrs. Baningway was crying out that her pearls had been stolen, her pearls had been stolen; and she clutched her neck and gasped as if she were choking. And Mr. Baningway said that a great thug of a masked creature had jumped on the running-board and brandished a revolver. And there was a man, a Mr. James Barnes, who said he'd been in the car right behind, and he was quite sure he saw two very short small figures jump on the runningboard, but nobody paid any attention to him.

Then suddenly Derek's stepfather caught sight of him, and his voice shot out, high and nervous and excited:

"What have you in your hand, Derek?" and the whole world stopped talking and looked at him with hostile burning eyes, and he answered hoarsely:

"I guess

these are the pearls."

And then, in the eyes of his mother, he read what she thought, and it was as if a pit opened before him down to the black depths of hell itself.

"I-I-I found them," he stammered, and the officer moved over and laid his hand on Derek's shoulder, and for a space of a ghastly moment no one spoke.

Then horror fell upon him. Every one talking his stepfather flushed, infuriated, gesticulating. "What

kind of a game was this to play on a man's guests? Did he know he'd

nearly killed that chauffeur? Did he know it? It would mean a prison sentence. A good stiff military reform school to take some of the nonsense out of him-only the courts could handle this sort of a fellowonly the courts—"

The policeman was asking, "Now, where's the gun, young fellow?”

And some one was saying, "Look at his pockets," and the officer was feeling in his pockets and bringing out bunches of carrots, and a hysterical laugh went up all over the room.

"Here's the gun," Derek said, and gave it to the officer; and in spite of the murmur among the people, he still couldn't believe they really thought he could have played such a rotten trick. "Let go of me, will you?" and he tried to shrug the policeman's heavy hand off his shoulder. "I'm not going to run away."

"I could swear it was too small kids who stopped that car," the Barnes man was insisting quietly. "Are Charley and Sonia—"

"They've been in their beds all evening. They'd never think of such a thing." Their stepfather was vehemently indignant, and various guests chorused, "Those darlingsimpossible-why, they're only babies;" but Derek's mother, standing pale before him said:

"Please go upstairs, Will, and see if they're in bed. Ask them if they have been out at all."

The man disappeared up the stairs, protesting, and a diversion was created by the wounded chauffeur's fainting on the ministering lady in the silver gown.

Derek leaned against a table, his legs shaking curiously, and he was

astonished suddenly to see a hand pushing a chair up to him. It was the Barnes man saying, quite kindly, "Sit down, my boy." He had been a friend of Derek's father and probably was sorry to see John Pyne's son such a rotter. And now he was giving the officer a cocktail, and Derek sat down and wished he could rest his head on the table, but he couldn't, of course. Funny how heavy a head could feel.

From where he sat he could see the portrait of his great-grandmother Patience Pyne, at the end of the dining-room above the sideboard. It was Sonia's now. But he'd always liked that portrait. She had such a fine honest kind old face. His father used to sit at that end of the table, and she had seemed to smile down on him. Gosh, she wouldn't be smiling down on Derek now. Yet oddly enough she did seem to be smiling kindly too. Sickening if all this row came to a court trial. And the penitentiary? Gosh! He couldn't believe it. Even a "good stiff military reform school" would be bad enough though. He couldn't bear not going back to his own school in the fall. Surely it wouldn't be as bad as that. Surely Sonia and Charley would back him up, and he'd get out of this hole someway. Gosh, if his mother really believed he'd do such a rotten trick as hold up a guest and shoot a man, she'd never think of him as anything but a beast as long as he lived. In her mind he'd be one. Worse than a pig. She mustn't think that of him. He couldn't bear it. He shivered, and his hands trembled, and he clenched them tight to keep them still.

Colors wove bewilderingly, blurred before his eyes, the women's gowns, the women's gowns,

silver and flame-color, blues and yellows, greens and orchids and gold. Their necks and arms were like cream satin; they were silken people, strands of woven colors, not real. And his blood beat in his ears as if it were a gong-and his mother, Circe, going silently among the vivid figures

"So they stood at the outer gate of the fair-tressed goddess, and within they heard Circe singing in a sweet voice as she fared to and fro before the great web unperishable such as is the handiwork of goddesses, fine of woof and full of grace and splendor."

Circe, the enchantress, was weaving this scene upon her tapestry. To and fro the bright colors ran, silver and flame-color, blues and yellows, greens and orchid and gold. From the strange dark magic of her mind she was fashioning this picture. And him, Derek, she was weaving into the pattern of a beast

Then again his stepfather was before him, and that vivid crowd grouped watching, and the officer's hand again heavy on his shoulder, and the lights were too bright, too horribly glaring in the hall.

"Of course they hadn't been out of their beds. They said they'd been asleep all evening." So Sonia and Charley had passed the buck to him, had they? Well, through all his bitterness he realized that they were only kids, and what could you expect of them?

"Did Sonia and Charley have anything to do with it?" his mother asked.

And he answered gruffly: "No-I did it." What else could he say?

As he was going out of the room after the tumult of horrible talk and decisions-apparently he was to be