but probably it was. Things were always going dreadfully wrong and be ing his fault this summer. He sat up in the hammock, rumpled and disheveled, and focussed his thoughts on the cushion. Oh, yes, it was the ruins of the "ammon' bar."

"Must be chocolate," and his changing voice sounded so alarmingly like a stevedore's that he didn't dare add, "I'm sorry," which he was. "Chocolate!" If it had been bloodstains from a slain and dismembered Charley the man's voice could not have registered more horror and disgust. "Of course it's impossible to eat chocolate without smearing it over the entire landscape." And again he gave that little complacent glance about. "I thought you weren't to eat between meals, Derek?"

"He's always eating between meals, aren't you, Derek?" Sonia piped in cheerfully. "He's always trying to lift things from the kitchen, but the new cook won't let him-" And Charley added pleasantly:

"Derek's a pig-hunc-hunc-hunc!" Then before any one could carry the agreeable discussion further, the picture changed as if some one had turned the pages of a book to another illustration. Three guests came up the terrace steps and Will Courtthat was the stepfather-hurried toward them, the perfect urbane host, having flung a hasty aside to Derek to "straighten up those cushions. The hammock's not a sty, you know." Sonia and Charley leaped from the terrace edge and chased each other across the lawn, with Jock, a swift black streak in mad pursuit. And Derek's mother came out of the house, tall and fair. Her hair seemed painted on her head, and she wore a

sea-green dress that Court said was the color of her soul or something, and a long string of strange gold and sea-green beads was about her neck and dripping earrings were pendant from her ears. The butler followed bearing silver tea things solemnly as if votive offerings to an oracle or god. And more people came from the house and up the terrace steps and eddied about the tea-table in whites and blues and yellows, while talk surged into waves of laughter and broke and surged and broke again.

And poor Derek, stranded in a small island of silence by the hammock, pretended to be busying himself straightening cushions, and wished unhappily that he could make his escape without being seen. He had hidden his "Odyssey" under his jacket, and he wanted to go off somewhere and lie down in the sun and read. He was tired, awfully sort of tired, and that beastly hunger that had possessed him all summer was urging him to some utterly crazy deed-to rush over and grab a handful of cakes from the basket on the table, for instance, or stuff a dozen or more sandwiches in his mouth at once. If they really meant that rule about not eating between meals, he thought he'd go off his bean, like the men you read of in the deserts, raving about food and water. Perhaps he was a little daffy now. He seemed to think about food the whole time; and he'd had to sneak so much dry breakfast food out of the pantry that the butler locked up the boxes now, and he couldn't get anything out of the new cook even by bribery. He'd soaked Derek with a rolling-pin last time and reported it to Court, and there'd been the dickens to pay.

Now his mother was beckoning to him. He went over to her, awkwardly, miserably aware of his ungainly height, his red hair standing on end, his interminable arms and legs, and that vile untrustworthy voice within him that squeaked or growled as if it were some unknown being speaking through his lips. He hated it. And now she was telling him to pass things, and he knew he'd spill them all over the place. Oh, heck! Why had there ever been that rotten divorce, and why couldn't the judge have given him to his own father, so that he might now be happy and free building bridges with him in Yucatan, instead of passing piffling little cakes to overfed females in green. "Sandwich," he squeaked, shoving the plate up to the portly bosom of a matron who looked like an emerald pigeon. Absent-mindedly she took three. His mouth watered, and he felt suddenly weak. He had had one very small chicken patty for lunch and a foolish salad, no more filling than so much green tissuepaper. He'd been late for breakfast, and when he was late he was only allowed toast and fruit. And supper was sure to be a total loss. It always was-a boiled egg perhaps and another dab of salad left over from lunch. His mother and stepfather were never hungry themselves. "Hunger" to them was a literary term applied only to peculiar people in books or charity reports, a word as impersonal and unreal as "famine" or "plague." Moreover they were always out or having a party at home, and Sonia and Charley had regular nursery food, and it was easy for the servants to forget Derek. Perfectly natural, of course.

"Can I have some sandwiches?" he growled hoarsely to his mother, trying not to hope so desperately that she would say yes. But of course she didn't. She looked at him for a second as if he'd suggested snatching the food from the mouths of their guests.

"Must you be eating all the time, Derek?" she asked coldly, and, to his horror, he felt tears burn in his eyes. She could hurt so unbearably. Perhaps if he hadn't loved her it would have been different. But he did love her, and she always seemed to think he was such a beast. He took a cup of tea from her, and his hand shook, and he spilled some on her dress. Oh, agony! If one got much hotter with humiliation, one would surely flame up in spontaneous combustion like that old man in Dickens.

"Gosh, I'm sorry," he growled, and she said resignedly, coolly as clear water down a mountainside,

"Pass the cakes, Derek; perhaps you won't spill those."

So he passed them, wondering, forlornly, what came over him when he was with his mother. When he was here at home, what was he? Not himself surely. Not the self he knew he was at school-Derek Pyne, "Piledriver Pyne," head of the form in Latin and English, lowest in math, fair in foot-ball, rotten in hockey, in line for president of students, and liked he knew they liked him well enough-by both masters and boys. And his own father had thought him decent enough. That last year before the divorce he'd talked to him like a man and a friend. But his motherwhy he was always afflicted with unutterable uncouthness in her presence, always spilling and bumping and growling and knocking over

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.

23

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. 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.

239

Then, incredibly, there was a shota woman screamed, and thensilence. 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 up the trellis quick."

"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