in a sort of royal state, wandering up the train to see if Judson was on it.

"I'm going to be in town till noon tomorrow," said Arthur. "You see Jud and fix it up to come on out with me."

"Don't see how we could. It's mighty good of you," Eben assured him, staring into the violet-lit suburbs of New York.

At the ramshackle, confused station of that year he lost Arthur by the baggage counter and found Bradley. They walked through the wooden passages chatting about nothing, and came to a chilly flight of six steps, where they slowed while a crowd melted up ahead of them under a frosty arc light. Near the foot of the steps one man remained, lagging to look at his watch, and the gold flash took Eben's eye as he approached. Then he saw that it was Judson.

His suitcase swung against a man and made him swerve. His breath stopped with sheer gladness. He halted. Judson put away his watch, and, somehow attracted, looked at Eben. His hands paused on the buttons of his overcoat. He turned the least bit white; then he tilted back his head and smiled. He smiled, and Eben's feet moved of themselves. He followed Bradley on, wondering if his heart would stop entirely.

"What were you sayin'?" he asked. “I did n't get it."

Jud hated him; he knew this surely now. For a miserable necktie and a word or two of advice Jud could turn on him that horrible childish smile. He left Bradley and walked, rain falling on him, to a hotel near the station, using only that part of his brain that told him small necessary things to ask for a room and bath and fee the page. Then he wrote a coherent letter to Mr. Edwardson explaining that he had accepted Arthur's invitation, forgotten it, and that the Letelliers were deeply offended. After this he lay on the ornate hotel bed and wished that he could cry himself to sleep.

Next morning he went to St. Louis with Arthur, saying nothing. The Letelliers had a spacious, comfortable house on Lindell Boulevard. They were in

half-mourning, which did not forbid them to give pleasant little dinners, and Eben, resolved to forget Judson forever, tried to be an obliging guest. He made sketches on bridge-scores and dinner-cards. He talked to strange girls about all things, and practised the new form of waltz with Marie Letellier. He managed to get out of the room when Arthur's small, lame brother came to be told good night. He developed a liking for claret, and wondered, being seventeen, if it was worth while to drink himself to death.

"You 're changing pretty rapidly," said Mr. Edwardson on an afternoon in May when he had come up to see him.

"Am I? Into-"

"A man, I suppose. You're pretty old for a boy without a solitary whisker on his face. You the E. Harland who had a cartoon in 'Life' last week?"

"Yes. I sent it on a bet," said Eben, dryly, so that Mr. Edwardson did not continue the topic.

"Where are you going this summer?" he asked instead.

"England and France with some friends from the West."

"This is a funny dodge of Juddy's," said the trustee, "changing to Princeton. Can't you stop it?"

After Eben had controlled his muscles he shook his head.

"I'm afraid not. When Jud wants to do anything he goes ahead and does it. We'd better go get some dinner."

When he had seen Mr. Edwardson on the train he went back to his rooms and began a letter, but did not go very far. Pride made the pen heavy, and sorrow spoiled the sheet. Let Jud go his way, he said at last; if he wanted Princeton, utter separation, let him have it. Eben had been reading "Cyrano," and a phrase rang out of it-"Poor Lazarus at the feast of Love." Love." He could not beg, as he might have done six months ago. He tore up the letter, and went to sing in the garden behind his lodgings.

In the autumn he played foot-ball up to the Princeton game and was used steadily on the university team. He was not a

brilliant player, but so reliable that coaches and trainers spoke of him as a possible future captain, and two fraternities waited on his choice with smiles more than inviting.

"What 's Jud's address at Princeton?" Arthur asked when the great gala was near. "I'm going to have lunch here in these rooms the day of the game."

"Huh? Oh, just Princeton 'll get him." "It might n't. I've sent letters there before."

Eben took his eyes off the sketch he was filling in and looked at Arthur wearily.

"I might as well tell you the truth, Let. I don't know his address. We 've not spoken or met in over a year-a year and two months. He does n't care about me any more.”

He glanced around their red burlap sitting-room and went on charcoaling the paper, shuddering before the advent of questions.

"I ought to have known," said Arthur. "All right, Ben; I won't say anything."

After this, and while Eben lay in the infirmary with the broken shoulder he got during the last second of play, Arthur gave him a new and far-seeing kindness that compensated a little for many things. The Letelliers had been driven to moving East. They now owned a house at Mamaroneck, and Eben spent Christmas there. He met a girl who had encountered Judson at Pasadena the previous summer as a friend of one Alan Kay. Eben resigned her to Arthur for the rest of his dance, and haunted Marie Letellier's wake for the remainder of the party. She was a gentle, timid girl a month. younger than himself, and Eben grew very fond of her, to Arthur's delight.

He knew gradually that Mr. Edwardson realized a breach, and was sorry, silently. As time passed the St. Paul's coterie in his class forgot about Judson except when his name appeared on the list of the Princeton base-ball team the ensuing year, filling Eben with pride. His foot-ball career was done; the surgeons insisted on that. He took to spasmodic running and left-handed tennis. But all the

glory of open field, the thunder of crowds, he wanted for Judson. He never saw him play, avoided the games, quite certain that in some way he must come near his beloved and get that horrible smile to burn him again, to render nights odious. He was drawing with regularity for several magazines, and people spoke of his happy treatment of boys or young athletes. He got sizable checks before his graduation, and could give Marie a large cluster of diamonds as a wedding present. They were married three days after his commencement, and lived for eight months in Paris, while he studied under Roll.

Marie's uncle, a Mr. Rand, was attached to the American embassy, and had a house in the Avenue François Premier. He asked the couple to Christmas luncheon, and there, entering the drawing-room, Eben was hailed from the fireside as "Jud" in a broken young voice. This had overtaken him before, but never so poignantly. It was a thin fellow of twenty or so, with a lambent, doomed face, who hurried over, pausing only as Eben colored.

"I'm not Jud. I'm his brother," he said swiftly.

I 'm so

"Oh, yes, the other twin? sorry. I'm rather a friend of his-Alan Kay. Perhaps you 've heard him speak of me?" he said wistfully, coughing.

"You-you live in Pasadena?" Eben remembered.

The consumptive beamed.

"Yes. I-I 'm on my way to San Moritz. Had a little throat trouble. Jud saw me off."

"How awfully stupid of me!" said Mrs. Rand. "Here Alan 's been writing me ever since he was a freshman—”

"Before, Aunt Jess," coughed Alan. "Met him out home."

galed by anecdotes of the brother-in-law she had never mentioned to her husband. He was bathed in the torturing flame for five hours; then Alan was ordered to bed. "When you write Jud," he said at parting, "say I was n't looking so awfully bad. He was worried about me. And I am glad I met you."

"So am I," said Eben, for it was true. Alan coughed his loyal soul out in the Engadine express, and when Eben heard of it by the infernal French telephone he

the gracious steps of that old, new, noble tower after a triumphant raid.

"Ever been at Princeton, Ria?" he asked her, idly.

"Yes, dear. I went to a dance there, at Mrs. Tree's last winter."

"It's a corking place, Princeton." Then he felt her breathing fast, and was driven to question with all the throbs it might bring on him, "Did you meet Juddy?"

"Yes, dear," said Marie, weakly.

"Did he-" "No, Ben."

She watched him undress in their staid. bedroom later, and cringed from his white face. She had the tenderness which seeks an alleviation of any wound and at any risk.

"Ben dear," she whispered, "I don't know anything; but he sent me a pearl pendant, such a lovely one, when we were married. It must have been he. It came from Princeton. It's in that japanned box."

Eben bent over the toilet-table, and she saw the muscles of his chest slide and bulge as he stared. Then he gave a soft cry and flung himself down, shaking the little bed and their unborn child.

"He could have written, he could have come!" She heard so much, then she pulled his head to her breast, and hated Judson so that her teeth clenched from jealousy.

"Tell me," she said.

"I can't. I think of it every day; I'll die thinking of it."

So she knew why he had turned so fast from the altar and stared out over the perfumed church, and why his face at the wedding breakfast had frightened her. And she loved him, illogically, more than ever, racked for some hidden hour.

Their boy was born at Mamaroneck, and fat Arthur came out next day with an expensive coral teething-ring.

"Oh, gorgeous!" said Eben. "Jud 'll be crazy over it. Take it up an' see if he yells."

Arthur shifted from foot to foot and twisted his mustache.

"I wrote Jud," he said.

Eben looked up from the ring and out past Arthur down the melting lawn to the roof of the church where the boy would be christened.

"Thank you. I'd let 's go up-stairs." But Eben and his heir were the only Harlands at the christening. Marie put a jeweler's box and its cup away in her father's safe, saying nothing, and left it there when they moved to an apartment off Park Avenue.

Time passed. Men nodded to Eben in the streets and apologized, saying how much he looked like a young chap at their broker's down-town. He declined invitations to dinners at the Princeton Club. He avoided Wall Street, this easily enough. He had a sweetly painful morning when Marie bore him twin sons, and he was plagued by curly heads seen across theaters, wide shoulders that swung by in the twilight. He bought back Edgar's house near Gloucester, and wheeled little Jud along the crescent beach. His name went into "Who 's Who" before Europe took to war, and he had bad nights remembering Jud's military passion. A great broker smirked to him at a dinner party over his brother.

"Travels for me. Customers think he's the best ever."

"He is," said Eben, proudly.

They had many friends, dull and interesting, and the babies had the proper diseases of babies, and Eben allowed a pastel of little Jud to appear in a Sunday edition, hoping that the smile for this would have no hate behind it. The daily pain gave birth to a deep ambition. Judson need not despise him. Art harpies shrugged and said he had no "temperament." His studio was as ascetic as a sick ward. Popular actors sent their valets to price portraits, ladies adjured him to give them some little thing for the Belgian relief.

Your

"And I wish you 'd be in the tableaux," said one, "in the Greek scene. brother is, and the pair of you-"

"I'm so sorry," Eben said.

He did not see the Greek scene. Marie did. He knew she would, and that night managed to look asleep when she came home. The photograph in the Sunday paper he laid carefully away in a desk of his studio. No dust gathered on it.

"A man would think you were twentysix hundred 'stead of twenty-six," Arthur complained. "Why won't you go to the Marengo?"

"Such a jam," said Eben.

It would be hideous to meet Judson in a crowd. But he began to feel that he could endure this for the sake of knowing

that his brother's skin was still whitely smooth and his arms as full of grace. The spring sent his soul wandering, and he dreamed of his brother. They were no longer boys, and love had outlasted the old nearness; it might still leap a gate. In his dream he said to Judson: "You don't hate me. You can't." And Judson changed the smile to a brother's grin. "What makes you so restless?" asked Marie.

"Oh, I don't know.

The rotten

weather, this Mexican row. Remember I was born in Texas."

Marie wiped milk off young Arthur's chin.

"I've often thought what a fine soldier you 'd make, dear. You 're so self-controlled and you 'd look so splendid. And your men would do anything for you."

Eben blushed. He was perpetually surprised that she could love him at all, a man his own brother hated, a man who could lie in her breast and long for an