Nothing warned the doctor to go the whole distance with Dennis and look in on Agnes once more that day. He did decide to call on the village doctor in the morning and go over the case with him, perhaps planning for her future care. The condition of Dennis himself was on his mind strangely when he tried to sleep. Were Throop a drinking man the appearance of his visitor might be attributed to whisky, but this and drugs Larabee could absolutely rule out of his calculations. Dementia præcox seemed quite possible, specially of the paranoiac type, as might be suggested by the grudge he bore Watters, and by the feeling that Watters was persecuting him, and yet in the short interview he had had, he could find no deterioration or splitting of personality. It was a difficult diagnosis, and he decided, as he turned his hot pillow, that he would take the case to his friend, Lowery Lawson, the psychiatrist, before pinning such a hopeless condition to Dennis. Perhaps it was only a case of nerves. Poor Dennis needed sleep and rest from worry and a change of scene, for the country that Agnes loved had never appealed to mountain-bred Dennis as much as the hurrying, noisy, prosperous city. It was possible that the lonely beauty of the hills through which Dennis had taken each day his tortuous run had made his nerves more jumpy than would a clangorous city route. Perhaps if anything happened to Agnes, for so lamely do we speculate in regard to the inevitable,—perhaps, the doctor thought, a position in the city could be found. Clangorous city streets, not so much rushing windthe wind began to sound like rain; lucky Dennis left for home when he did.

The next morning he slept deeply, and waked struggling to put together the memory of a dream that his subconscious self had concocted when the whistle of the seven o'clock Mirro Lake trolley shrilled across the glen. It was not many hours later that Larabee came down to the valley to leave the key of the lodge for the day. He was thinking of the possibility of planning a trip to the city for Dennis for the next

day. At the entrance to the ravine he met the village doctor and another man going away, and the doctor told him that Agnes had died very suddenly from a hemorrhage the night before. There had been only time to call Father O'Neal, but no one could go up to the lodge.

Dennis was sitting quietly outside the door of the ramshackle little house. The valley was unusually beautiful that day. The stream, filled by the recent rain, was shouting as it leaped down the side of Castle Mountain, and the little spring by which Agnes had liked to sit was full of life and sunshine. Pouring over the rocky shelf below a tiny waterfall, sprang a pale green mass of bladder fern darkened with flying spray. At Dennis's very feet brave clusters of Agnes's glowing may-pinks held up their faces to the sun, and overhead a yellow goldfinch gave its plaintive call. From the deepest pines came the thin, tremulous whistle of the linnet, and the tamaracks were like lace against the sky.

Dennis put his hand out to his friend, but he seemed to shrink from him at the same time. Larabee sat down beside him on the low stone step.

"I should have let you come home as you wanted to," he said simply, for he knew what was in the man's mind.

"I got here in time," Dennis said slowly after a pause, which the goldfinch had filled with song. "I know she was glad I went up there to see you. I told her the whole thing before she died."

"I'm glad of that, Dennis." For the life of him Jack Larabee could not shake off the strange baffled sense of contending against something beyond his comprehension. The beauty of the valley and the presence of death were both almost unreal beside this power that was slowly, but inexorably, getting its hold upon Dennis. Of course it was only a coincidence that the blue workman should have been seen at the lodge the night that Agnes died, but Larabee knew that it was no coincidence in Throop's mind that he sat there trying to make believe that the only real things were the things which other people saw and heard.

"You can go back with me now for good, Dennis," Larabee said at last. Dennis laughed shortly.

"Lord, if I could have gone clangin' down Third Street in old Sixty-Four, maybe this would n't have happened. I wish we'd never seen this cursed place."

"Steady, there, Throop. You know you made Agnes very happy by bringing her here, and she probably stayed with you longer than you could have kept her in the city."

Dennis did not answer. A scarlet tanager flashed through the pine boughs and was gone.

"Did you see that?" cried Jack. "What a place for birds this valley is!" "We have lots of those red birds here," the man answered indifferently. Then he softened a little. "Agnes would have liked it out here this morning," he said. His chest heaved once, convulsively, but after that he was very quiet.

"She told me to tell you somethin'," he began a little later, when a song sparrow had stopped to take breath. "Don't it seem queer that an ordinary bird should sing like that?" he asked suddenly.

"Perhaps it's the best thing we could listen to this morning, Dennis."

"I don't know. I can't seem to think how Agnes's voice sounds when that bird keeps up such a racket. I keep tryin' to think of what she told me last, and told me to tell you, Doctor, but I can't seem to put my mind on it long enough to get it straight."

The valley was still for a moment, except for the continual rushing of the stream down Castle Mountain, and the never-ending swish of the wind through the trees. Then when Dennis began to speak a veritable chorus of melody seemed to burst from the throats of the birds that were hidden in the shrubbery by the spring.

"Confounded little yellin' things!" the man said irritably. "I can't think for listenin' to 'em."

"What did Agnes say?" asked the doctor.

"She said " Dennis raised his voice a little just as every bird stopped singing except one plaintive, calling thrush.

The tender little song went on steadily as a kind of accompaniment to Dennis's message. "She said she thought I saw what I saw because my mind was all worked up, and that there would n't be any truth in it, no matter when it came nor what happened right afterward. She said I was to go back to the city and do the things I wanted to do and that she could promise me " Dennis looked at the doctor slantwise, but went on defiantly-"she said she could promise me that if I tried to be happy and like other folks and got away from this place I hate, that the man would n't come. She said if he did come, I was to remember that he was n't there, because she said so. I'm always to remember that he is n't there; Agnes said he would n't be there. I am to take her word for it. I'm goin' to do it, too, Doctor. She said she felt happier at knowing what was troubling me, and I feel a heap better now-after what she's said."

"That's the talk." Jack Larabee stood up and drew a deep breath. "You'll come out all right, Dennis," he said.

So, after all, the doctor did not leave his lodge key that morning, but he stayed with Dennis until a third grave was made by the stream among the ferns, and then the two men left the valley.

"I'm all right now," Dennis said triumphantly when they were once more in the rush and roar of the train shed into which their train had just rumbled. "I'm myself again. No more troubles at Stop Six." He was almost offensively sure of himself.

It was some six months later that Larabee stood with Bridges, a friend who had summoned him, and looked down an embankment into the river, in which lay a trolley-car, inverted and twisted beyond recognition.

"He went into the river full speed. That can be explained, though," one of the officers of the road was remarking to Bridges.

"Why should he?" Bridges put the question with an eye upon the speaker. "This gentleman is a friend of mine," he said meaningly. "He recommended him for the place."

"Go ahead with your explanation,"

Larabee said almost rudely. "I have nothing to say except that poor Throop was as good a motorman as I ever knew."

As the men looked at Throop's champion a trifle curiously and then drifted into solemn groups of two and three, Larabee followed Bridges away from the embankment. He was recalling sadly the fact that it was over five months since Dennis had started his run on this line, and the previous week he had been pleased and encouraged to hear of Throop's satisfactory record. Two weeks of rest in the city, and assurance by more than one professional friend of Larabee's had set him up again. He had also dwelt continually on Agnes's last speech to him. He had referred to it in speaking to Larabee.

"I may think I see the old feller, but he won't be there." His manner had been triumphant; he had regained his former resiliency, and the past was like a bad dream to him.

"Fortunately, the car was empty, and

the conductor had time to jump," Bridges was saying. "Everybody knew about these repairs; the cars have n't been farther than that signal for three days, but Throop put on full speed ahead and went straight into the river."

"How do you account for that?" Larabee asked mechanically.

"Oh, he preferred suicide to a charge of manslaughter." Bridges's tone was grim as he stooped and lifted one corner of a canvas that covered an object on the ground. "This workman," he continued, pointing to the body of a man under the canvas, "ran out of the alley over there and was crossing the track when Throop deliberately ran him down. Witnesses say it was sheer murder."

"Blue overalls, blue blouse, cap pulled over his forehead," Larabee muttered to himself as Bridges dropped the

canvas.

"The doctor looks as if he had seen a ghost," the foreman remarked. Larabee looked at him oddly for a second and walked away.

A

MERICANS whose interest in Russia antedates the year 1914 must be aware of a notable change in our attitude to and our utterances concerning that unhappy nation. Before the World War we were, in a measure, compelled to seek a special terminology when writing on Russia. Scarcely anything appeared in print that was lacking in abundant use of such terms as idealism, basic humanity, selfsacrifice, remorseless passion for truth, etc. The Russian masses were extolled for their inherent qualities and their heroic struggle for freedom quite as much as the Russian martyrs and leaders were. George Kennan and others who had the privilege of meeting the champions of Russian liberty confessed to having been uplifted by their simplicity, courage, and boundless faith in the people. To the subjects of Nicholas II these masters in self-abnegation brought a faith in human values and a spiritual sustenance that helped them bear their too dreary existence. For many years the effort of the revolutionists to secure for the people a better and freer life was the only gleam of hope that penetrated to the unhappy millions. And the outside world thought and spoke of that struggle in terms of idealism, of eternal principles of righteousness, of truth. Quite a different conception of Russia and her problems grew up with Lenine. Apparently the changes in the Slav empire, so swift and overwhelming that a short three years, when measured in blood and suffering, can be likened to a century, have forced a change of attitude and vocabulary. Russia of the Soviets became a subject for "practical" discussion.

Why revert to idealism when we might discuss industrial nationalization? One was antiquated beyond all hope who would not prefer to seek information relative to the organization of the Soviets and the various trying duties of the commissars, rather than bother about a timeworn "ideology" like truth. The receptive foreign public was deluged, on the one hand, with information concerning the practical activities of Soviet Russia, and, on the other, with assurances that the Soviet Republic was not at all the creation of dangerous dreamers and idealists, but was really a very harmless and conventional form of government, with Lenine and Trotzky making concessions to the bourgeois, offering protection to foreign commerce, and standing ready to abandon their international policy or propaganda. In fact, Lenine and Trotzky would concede anything if only permitted to keep the Soviet. In the Soviet itself there was no danger; why quarrel over a word? The defenders of Bolshevism in America might even have gone on to explain that Soviet, after all, only means council and that under the autocracy, the Gosudarstvenye Soviet (the Council of the Empire) was as omnipotent a body as the Central Soviet. The former was as far removed from the people and had just as little confidence in its ability to act and think for itself. One might quote Mr. Lincoln Steffens to the effect that "the present Russian Government is the most autocratic government I have ever seen. Lenine, the head of the Soviet Government, is farther removed from the people than the czar was, or any other ruler in Europe." And again, "No student of government likes the Soviet as it has