them mechanically-held out her hand to the doctor murmuring "Miss Carlotta-Miss Miriam," fearful always lest she should mix their names. "How nice to see you, Doctor! There's nothing wrong, is there? Annie said Grandpère was splendid." She spoke hurriedly, nervously. There was something in their manner as they stood and looked at her, that made her creepy. She was, after all, just a young girl, wearing a very short dress of beautiful, warm reda good deal of silk leg showed-she gave her dress a vicious pull down in front. Her long fingers smoothed the back of her "bob." But she knew instinctively that the air was charged with trouble-calamity, perhaps something which might eliminate altogether so trivial an attitude as that of disapproval.

They all regarded her steadily. The doctor spoke first, as one accustomed to taking the initiative, though he had obviously waited half a minute out of courtesy to the others.

"Julie, my dear, a most unfortunate thing has happened: they got word here about half an hour ago that Seymour died this evening."

Julie's hand went to her throat. "Seymour! I thought he was out of danger. How-how terrible!"

"His heart was overstrained by his illness or possibly he had the beginning of his father's complaint without his father's constitution or healthy habit of life. It's a bad business, Julie!"

Howard Seaton was speaking in his dry voice. "He reads four newspapers every day from cover to cover. Who's going to tell him he can't have 'em?"

"Oh, I suppose you're right. He'd suspect, if the papers were kept from him-but it's dreadful. Can't you do something, Doctor?" There were tears in Julie's voice.

The doctor shook his head.

"Can't even let him know I'm in the house-I'll stay though," he paused, "until he is told."

"But he'll never stand the shock, when he hears! It's like somebody deliberately taking his life! The person who tells him will have it on his soul all his life-like murder." Julie gave a little shiver.

"We thought," said Miss Carlotta in her breathy voice, "that you would be the best one to tell him!"

"I" Julie wheeled about on her high red heels in a sudden fury of

amazement.

"Yes!" they all assented in various cadences. The doctor put his hand on her shoulder-he had to reach up, being a good half head shorter.

"Easy, child, don't get so angrythey don't mean anything unkind or cruel."

"But I? Why should I be the one to kill him? It might be that—you said so yourself. How could I do it— he's such a darling!" Her voice broke.

"That's just why you ought to do it, Julie. It would come easier from you-you'd know how to soften the

"Oh-it must be kept from him!" "Impossible, Julia!" Old Mr.

hard, cold face of Miss Miriam. The queer, fishy eyes were filled with tears. Miss Carlotta's rough, old

face was working. Why they really cared for him after all, she thought! So it was not because they were cowards that they wished to pass the grim task on to her. Rather, it was because they honestly believed she had the warmth, the human power of affection which would help to soften the blow, to make his fondness for her into a kind of shock absorber for saving him unspeakable pain.

Julie faced them miserably. She could not remember in her whole life ever having quite such an unhappy moment. It was as though the sun were blotted out, leaving a strange, artificial light in the world, like the total eclipse she had once seen.

"The funeral arrangements must be made the first thing in the morning-"

Her heart gave a painful leap, and then subsided. It was poor Seymour they were "arranging" for-not his father-he was still alive, thank God! But Julie knew that she must not stay down in the hall talking any longer. The old man would get suspicious; he always knew the precise moment of her arrival.

"You'll do it, Julie?"

The four of them closed in on her. She felt as little able to escape as though she were in the dragging clutch of a familiar dream that weighted her feet when she was in a subconscious frenzy to escape. She was in agony to escape now, but just as inevitably as the dream, the pressure closed in on her consciousness like a vise.

"You'll do it, Julie?" Old Mr. Howard had never before called her "Julie."

"You'll make it easier, Julia." They were playing on her: Miss

Miriam even touched her with her large, queer hands that were not too scrupulously kept. It was age, a queer unsavoriness and lack of grooming dwelt about age; and yet, there was Grandpère, the oldest of them all, immaculate, finicky at the age of eighty-four; his handkerchiefs, she remembered irrelevantly, always smelt faintly of an imperishable brand of German cologne. No, it was not age that was necessarily untidy-it was character; Miss Miriam and Miss Carlotta must have been just as stale at twenty. "Please, Julie!"

She put her hand over her eyes and shut them out. After all, she was only a child compared with them; how dared they impose such a gruesome task on her young spirit! But battle as she would for herself, Julie knew in her heart that she was the only one who could help the old man in his sorrow. It was that knowledge, that conviction, akin to the impulse which had made her seek him out months ago, that now urged her to do the last service for him that she probably could ever do.

"All-right," she said.

Without another word she turned and left them. A slender, red-clad figure, usually so buoyant, she dragged her feet up the wide, familiar staircase, as though her red-heeled slippers were relics of the stone age.

going on the stage and playing a part. She remembered what the old stage-manager had said. She must do her best, put "heart" into her performance. She had to play herself, the Julie she had always been, but she seemed like a stranger. To-night, the real Julie had a heavy heart and a childish desire to throw herself down somewhere-anywhere —and cry and cry.

She managed to enter the library, however, with her usual air of smart prettiness. It was a big, square, oakpaneled room with long, French windows that looked far away over the water to blue hills beyond. To-night the water and sky were visible only in a luminous blending of dark intense blue, pierced with many stars.

Mr. Seaton, gray and bright-eyed, sat in his high-backed chair beside a big oak table with a beautiful Chinese screen behind him to keep out possible drafts.

The evening papers lay beside him in a pile. At Julie's approach, he laid down a pencil and dictionary with which he was seeking to solve an intricate cross-word puzzle.

"Hello, Grandpère! Is the sloth on the job?"

She bent over and kissed himthe faint, clean smell of eau de Cologne was about him—and slipped into a low chair near his.

"It's nice to see you, Julie! No, the sloth is off for the evening, but the gnu is taking his place in the plural, mind you! Do you know, I've about made up my mind that these fellows make the new puzzles up from the old ones-piece 'em together; that's why the same words appear so often."

"I shouldn't wonder! You're look

ing very fit!" He nodded slowly, with a queer little smile. "I'm a sham, child-a hollow mockery-by right I should have died five years ago. I'm virtually dead, as it is—no good to myself or any one else. It's only nitroglycerin that's keeping me going. I sometimes wonder why I take it at all. What is this thing in us that forces us to prolong our lives away beyond our allotted time?"

"I don't know, Grandpère, but your allotted time isn't up yet-no it isn't!" She shook her bobbed head with emphasis.

"I doubt it!" he smiled at her; "Now what have you been doing this week? Have a cigarette? I'll have one with you." Mr. Seaton reached over to the table and took up an ivory box. "Your favorites!"

Julie did not move to help him; he was sensitive about it. She sat quite still while he passed the box to her and while he struck a match for her to light her cigarette. Not that she wanted it particularly, but there was a sociability in the two of them smoking together that she knew appealed to her grandfather. Cigarettes, and those few and far between, were all that he

allowed to smoke-a miserable comedown, he considered it, for a man accustomed to strong cigars and the best English brier-pipes. It was all a part of the tiresome ritual of getting ready to die. It irked him terribly this lingering thing; he had always been a methodical man-nothing on his desk, every task finished day by day with promptness and despatch.

"What happened this week, anything interesting? Anybody nice come to see you?" Julie put her ashes carefully into the receiver.

Old Mr. Seaton shook his head. "There's nobody I want to see; they're all dead. The only people who take the trouble to come out here are the heads of charitable institutions!" He spoke bitterly.

"Don't be such a silly old pessimist, don't I come to see you? I'm not an organized charity!" Julie crossed her knees vehemently.

"It's good of you, my dear; your visits mean so much, I don't have to tell you!" He touched her cheek lightly with his thin finger.

"Certainly you don't! But I like to hear it, it flatters me. Oh, I had a letter from mother this morning. She sent her love to you. Her play's doing wonderfully at His Majesty's; she's made a hit. Isn't that fine! The only thing is it will probably run forever the way they do over there, and she won't come back back for ages."

"You can always come here, you know, Julie. I'm glad your mother's a success. How does she look now as pretty as ever?"

"Oh, prettier! she's gray, you know, and she's bobbed her hair; she looks lovely; as slender as she can be, and not nearly so tall as I amlooks younger than I do in her makeup."

"She always was a beauty, but it's her spirit that keeps her young-a wonderful woman, my dear; and your play-how's that going?"

"It's a riot! Starting in on the fourth month, and selling out every night! The management has given us all new gowns. I wish you could see mine-it's gorgeous-all front and no back-the eel's whiskers!"

The old man smiled and shook his head. A silence fell between them

while his thoughts seemed to drift off toward some strange country which he glimpsed perhaps because he was so near the Borderland.

Julie kept still. In her intercourse with him she had discovered that he tired less if she let the conversation drift with the tide of his mood in a restful ebb and flow of talk. Sometimes there were long silences between them, when she would pick up a puzzle, and old Mr. Seaton would drop off into a short sleep that would refresh his tired brain.

Mechanically, Julie took up the paper and turned to the puzzle, but the squares danced before her eyes. Her thoughts harassed her almost beyond endurance. To sit and talk commonplaces with him when the grim specter of death stood just behind his shoulder, was more than she could bear. She usually forgot his frail condition, in the selfless pleasure of their companionship; but to-night she was the instrument chosen to give him pain; she had to hurt him unspeakably; stab him in a vulnerable spot, perhaps be responsible for his death. She groped for a way out, but was met only by an impasse.

Through the mist of her thoughts, she became aware that Mr. Seaton had awakened; he was talking. She looked up and met his keen blue eyes. An article he had been reading he said, dealt with certain conditions in the juvenile courts and suggested his boyhood to him. He laid down the magazine and began to recall certain happenings, escapades of his boyhood at school, nearly—it was incredible-seventy-five years ago!

He talked of his school, the life there, the masters, the discipline, and

above all, the pranks that he, as a boy of ten had played on the stodgy teachers. She listened while he drew her the picture of that small boy; clever, rebellious, resourceful; brilliant when he chose to be; resentful of injustice—just like little boys she knew. But that boy, that brilliant, incorrigible, profane and mischievous little Seymour that the old man was making live in her imagination, like Peter Pan, had not gone back to the Never-Never-Land! He had remained to grow up-to grow old, to decay-she shuddered. The small, gray, desiccated figure with the keen blue eyes and snow-white imperial, sitting opposite in the high-backed chair, was that boy! He still lived. The thick brown hair-silver nowbut the same hair; the bony structure of the frail body was the same structure that had served the boy, Seymour, to win cups and medals in certain athletic achievements. Those thin, immaculate, slowly-moving, ivory hands were the same, made of the actual bone and muscular tissue, they were the chubby, dirty fingers that had collected bugs and frogs and put worms on fish-hooks for that grimy, vivid little Seymour of seventy-five years ago.

Seventy-five years! Julie couldn't take it in. So long ago was a "period"; something that belonged in her school history book. The people who lived so long ago, only existed between the covers of books. But here was Grandpère telling animated anecdotes of his childhood! She wondered how he could remember. It would be the ego-that enduring little flame that could burn as brightly at eighty as at eight. The only difference was that in maturity

one learned to screen the flame from observation.

Grandpère had given her a picture of that boy, and made him live; they had the same soul, the child and the old man-it would endure. Perhaps when the old man waked from his last sleep, he would again be the boy in the Never-Never-Land. It took away the ugliness from death. That mischievous little spirit in Grandpère was deathless; in eighty-five years, its vigor was undimmed!

"Yes, I was suspended for two months, but when I came back, I wrote a composition on the Egyptian mummies that was read out in class, and took a prize. Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' bound in red and gold calf!"

"You were bright, even if you were naughty, weren't you, Grandpère?"

He nodded and leaned his head against the high back of his chair. The narrative had evidently tired him. Already Julie felt the little boy slipping back into the shadows whence he had been evoked—there was only left a tired old gentleman.

"How about us all going to bed, dear?" Julie spoke softly.

"Not just yet-you know I don't like to lose a minute of your visitI'm all right-play something, and then we'll go to bed."

Julie rose obediently. Over in a shadowy corner of the room was a small, grand piano. It had been placed there for Julie. Mr. Seaton liked the pleasant, desultory way she played and the warm sweetness of her somewhat husky contralto.

She sat down and played a few chords of an Irish song of her mother's. There was an ache-a sob-in her throat. She wondered how she could get a song out of it.