roused to its waking yawn, Roddy resorted to unwonted subterfuge. "I would n't mention Minnie Bee to Berta, Murry," said he, too carelessly. Mary instantly turned on Roddy a suspicious glance. "Berta has a sort of foolish prejudice against her," said Roddy, loftily. "I see," said Mary. She held her head high, and walked along stiffly by Roddy now. The idiot actually endeavored to convert her to his point of view. They were passing Minnie Bee's Uncle Joe's harness shop when he thus wasted breath. Mary turned her head, and viewed its swinging sign. "I thought the name seemed familiar," said Mary. She had kissed Minnie Bee! "The prettiest and cleverest girl in this confounded town," exploded Roddy. He had got white over it. He knew now who had invented the caste system. Women. The vain women who must have slaves and underlings to satiate their infernal selfishness. Imagine a world run by them! Bedlam, that's what it would be. Her tone was extremely severe. Roddy simply could not help feeling like a naughty little boy. He ignored Berta entirely. "Are you going to call there with me to-morrow?" he demanded of Mary. "Certainly not." "Kindly inform me what excuse I am to give." "Any you like." "I think you had better, in common decency, go home," said Roddy, furiously. "Oh, Roddy, you are too funny!" said Mary. Her tone changed to one of indulgence. "Certainly I have no earthly intention of going home before I get ready." She moved off with Berta, glancing over her shoulder to call out, "You can say to your little friend that I have toothache, if you like." Roddy flung off to his room in the rage of his life. He went alone the next afternoon to call on Minnie Bee. He looked so unhappy when he lied and said that his sister had unexpectedly been prevented from accompanying him, and was very sorry indeed about it, that Minnie Bee made herself sweeter than he had ever seen her. He lifted his hat sternly to Pagie Presley and Wirt, also returning from a before-breakfast stroll to the old college, taken in the opposite direction, a thing. which would occur sometimes with unscrupulous young men in charge of the expedition. He stood aside sternly during the badinage which ensued. He accompanied Mary home, still sternly. In the hall he offered her the sketch. "Perhaps you had better keep it," said brought there was extremely rare. Mary, hatefully. At that moment Berta appeared with her basket of housekeeping keys, noticed the sketch, and insisted on examining it. "One of Minnie Bee's," said Roddy, out of sheer, desperate bravado. "We picked her up on our walk," said Mary. Her glance promised that Bertal should hear all about that later on. Berta comprehended at once that Mary had been the victim of a most shameful imposition. She said warmly: "I did n't think you capable of an underhanded trick like that, Roddy." There was nothing petty about Minnie Bee. She had not the faintest inclination to take it out on Roddy, but, all the same, it was a turning-point. Motor-cars were not rare in town, of course, though some horses and persons still shied at them; but such a long, wicked-looking car as Seaton Minnie Bee's smoke-blue bonnet and Seaton's rakish cap used every day to be seen bent together while Seaton drove Minnie Bee saunteringly along the lovely roads of spring. When Roddy did receive a modicum of her society it seemed to him that she was somehow different, that a new expression, almost one of recklessness, pervaded her loveliness. He said to her once, with a hurt feeling at heart: "I don't believe you care for me any more, Minnie Bee." "Don't you, dear?" asked Minnie Bee. She offered her hand, sweetly. Roddy's face quivered. He wanted to say to her that he could n't possibly help things turning out so; but, naturally, it was n't a thing he could say. He stooped his head, and kissed her hand instead; but Minnie Bee knew, sadly enough, that it was only a pretty piece of boyish chivalry. There were other reasons than the ones made by Minnie Bee for Roddy's seeing her less frequently. He had a lot of work to make up. He would have felt a good deal of diffidence about going home if he had failed in exams. Not that his father attached undue importance to the academic aspect of a college career; but he did attach immense importance to Roddy's toeing the mark, wherever it might happen to be. Roddy had to sit up nights and drink outrageously strong coffee; but though he detested cramming and coffee, he felt that but for him Minnie Bee might never have realized the satisfactions of friendship, and he had no regrets. On the last day of commencement, returning from a solitary stroll, undertaken in hope of losing on the way the slight headache occasioned by burning so much midnight electricity for weeks on end, he sighted Seaton's car crawling up the long ascent. On reaching him it stopped, and Seaton leaned out. "I was just wishing I might chance on you, Ivor," said he. For the first time within Roddy's experience of him his striking, dark face wore an air of youthful happiness and gaiety. In fact, he did not look a brute, at all. Roddy glanced, puzzled, from Seaton to Minnie Bee. "We 've just been married," announced Minnie Bee in a self-possessed manner. It was Seaton who colored. Smiling, Minnie Bee retied the veil-ends of a new, pinkish gray motoring bonnet. Roddy continued to look at the two in an odd silence. "Harry," said Minnie Bee, calmly, to Seaton, "please go and get me a bridal bouquet from the hawthorn-tree yonder." Seaton, with a whimsical glance at Roddy, obeyed at once. "Minnie Bee," said Roddy, the instant Seaton was out of hearing, "why did you do it?" "Oh, I don't know," said Minnie Bee, lightly. "Out of gratitude, perhaps, Roddy, for my first proposal." Roddy stared at her, astounded. "Why, no end of fellows must have made love to you!" "Made love to me, yes!" cried Minnie Bee. So it flamed into words at last, though she had never meant it to. "I-I-never-" Roddy halted, stam Minnie Bee turned the butterfly blue of her eyes on Roddy for a long, long time. "Yes," she whispered at last. Her eyes wandered to Seaton, who seemed about to move toward them. Her hand closed on the edge of the car. Roddy laid hold of it entreatingly. "Minnie Bee," he said, "I can't believe a wonderful girl like you would marry a man you did n't love. I can't believe you are that sort of girl." Minnie Bee looked down. Her fingers. struggled slightly with Roddy's. A deep, beautiful blush flowed over her face. "You are in love!" cried Roddy, triumphantly. All at once Minnie Bee ceased to struggle. Her face flowered into blue eyes and whiteness. She looked up at Roddy, her heart on her sleeve. Roddy felt extraordinarily happy. She was not that sort of girl. "It 's so splendid of you, Minnie Bee," he said, "to make me quite contented about you." about you." He could let go her hand now. "Just a word," said Seaton at his elbow. He filled Minnie Bee's arms with sprays of the most heavenly fragrance as he went on speaking. "You 're an awful ass, Ivor; but you are a good chap, and you 've been a good friend to my girl here, and I want to say to you that I'm going to spend the rest of my life making up to her for what this cursed town's done to her. That's all, except"-he wrung Roddy's hand so that it hurt-"confound you, and-bless you!" Roddy, pardonably bewildered, moved. away a little. He stood by the flowering hawthorn, his hat off, waving it, and smiling affectionately at them both as the car began to speed up the long hill. He watched it until Minnie Bee's bonnet was withdrawn like a whiff of rosy cloud into the stealing evening. She was gone. Her friendship, not, after all, his to the end, was a thing of yesterday, and her wistful face only a picture on Memory's wall. Strange how a person may be your intensest present one moment and your irrevocable past the next! Roddy stood motionless for a long time by the hawthorn-tree, gazing across a mile of sunset-colored air to the town where Minnie Bee could not be happy. It was a fair old town of shining memories. Life had humanized it. Death had hallowed it. War had touched it with flaming sword. One of the greatest gentlemen of all time had lived and taught and died there. A young man could hardly gaze across to its walls and roofs, now golden in the rich evening light, without being thrilled by its legend of heroic youth. Yet Minnie Bee, having been born out of her caste, could not be happy there. Vaguely, yet vividly, all this passed in the mind of the boy standing by the haw thorn-tree. But it was a problem of the ages which time itself might never find the leisure for solving, and Roddy was not quite twenty-one. He let it go, and mused instead of his friend of the look which had confessed her love for Seaton. Roddy had been tremendously impressed with that look of Minnie Bee's. Some day, he hoped, a girl would love him like that. I To One Dead By DAVID MORTON THINK that if you suddenly returned, I think if I should come with you to tea, I should not find you changed or grave or sad, But keen with talk of what there was to see, Laughing the while in that frank way you had. There would be stories of the shadowy host, And sprightly comment on the things they do: Or that one was adorable in blue. It would be good to hear the things you said— THE An Episode By ROGER WRAY first-floor HE male occupied the first-floor room overlooking the sea; the female had the room on the ground floor immediately beneath his. She had arrived only that evening, yet within a couple of hours she knew all the main facts about him; that is, she knew all that Olwen could tell her. Nobody ever seemed His name was Preston, and he had the rooms all the year round; he was about forty years of age; he was a science teacher in the local college; he had "some o' them letters, like, after his name"; he had "books and things" all round the room; he had a microscope and a piano and some old china ("as old as Adam"); altogether he was a "queer old stick" and he had a club-foot. to come to see him. Sometimes he scarcely spoke a word for days on end; sometimes he was talkative: that was when he had "one of his piano-fits." But when he got his nose buried in his books he "never noticed nothing nor nobody." There was a lonely look in his eyes at times, and Olwen felt a strange compassion for him. She was certain he meant no harm. It was only his "studying ways" that made him like that. The female listened to Olwen's description with a show of sympathy. From her window she scanned him comprehensively as he entered the house. It confirmed most of what the maid had said. She had him classified, as it were, and from that moment her curiosity, being satisfied, dropped asleep. SHE slipped into his consciousness first of all as a faint perfume. He did not know that she was in the house. He had not heard or seen anything that might have given him the clue to her coming. That perfume was the only hint of her presence. When he went up to his bedroom he had suspected nothing; but on going downstairs to his living-room a new odor had momentarily touched his senses. It was sweet and exquisitely subtle. Had it been weaker, he might not have noticed it at all; had it been more obvious, he would. doubtless have given it a chemical formula and forgotten it. Its very elusiveness baffled him. It was to him the unknown, and it haunted him all evening. It was curious how persistently his mind reverted to that triviality. He attempted to read the treatise on “Dynamical Isomerism" which had been sent to him by the author that afternoon. It had made him eager, almost excited, when it arrived; but it was no use. His eyes traveled down the pages with a scythe-like movement without gathering the meaning. ing. It was strange, he fell to thinking, how instinctively one associates perfume with woman. She is essentially animal, as animal as a male; yet she contrives to suggest, well, not exactly the spiritual, but, at any rate, the oral. She eats beefsteak like a man, but she appears, somehow, ethereal. Her colors, her scents-her outline is an efflorescence; her petticoat is a corolla. He was vaguely surprised that Olwen had not mentioned that a new visitor was expected. Olwen generally reported the affairs of the household to him when she brought in the tea. Perhaps he had not been in an approachable mood. She must have gone up-stairs or come down while he was in his bedroom. There had been no voices, no footsteps, not a trace of her existence. If he had seen her face to face he would have thought no more about her, but this perfume was tantalizing. It was at once a luxury and a mystery. He began to be seriously annoyed with himself. Women had never enticed his curiosity like this. He had been far more enthusiastic over Amabæ and Rotifera under a microscope. He saw them dispassionately and without emotion, as wellknown specimens of a familiar species of fauna. He lived for his research. Science has her celibates and martyrs, as religion has. Of course he would see her and hear her to-morrow. Was she old or young? Was she married or single? A widow, perhaps? Was she beautiful? At that moment she was merely a waft of perfume on the stairs. He tried the piano, but after strumming a few bars he closed the lid sharply and viciously. It was exasperating. He sat in the bay-window and looked out to sea. The sun had set, and the water was turning to those weird grays and blues one sees in some of Watts's pictures. It made him shudder. The sky-line was clearly defined-indigo against the waning light. He saw the summer visitors taking their after-dinner promenade along the road beneath him. Night after night he watched them. He knew most of them by sight, recognizing them in a desultory way. There was the daintily stepping French girl in her mauve frock and leghorn hat. There was the lady who looked like an operatic singer, magnificent in physique and a splendid swimmer. After his fashion he admired them. But they were there, visible and tangible. They did not distract him with evasive odors and mysterious suggestions. The next evening Preston made his second discovery about the female; in fact, he made several discoveries. First of all, he heard the rustle of her dress. He was in his bedroom at the time, and she ran up-stairs and into the room adjoining his own. Running! Evidently she was young and active. The discovery pleased him. She was not in her bedroom more than half a minute, and ran down-stairs before he had a chance of catching a glimpse. The perfume lingered for a little. Through the open door he saw-he could not help seeing-her travelingtrunk. There was nothing impalpable about that. It was covered with labelscabin numbers, names of hotels, the careless scribble of customs. It was clear at a glance that she was rich. She had been to Cairo, Buenos Aires, New York, Paris, Zermatt, Milan, and Mentone. He did not intend being so curious, but the fact remained. She was still a mystery. Why should she want to stay in apartments when she could afford the European hotels? He made a third discovery as he went out to post. Her room door was wide open as he passed, and he saw a box of cigarettes on the sideboard. For a moment he felt a resentment, but he excused her. Certainly she was young,-young and modern, -with dashing ideas and Parisian dresses. The cigarettes explained all that at once. His fourth discovery took his breath. away. He opened his door and stepped on the dark landing just as she came rushing full tilt up the stairs. She ran into him at the corner. "Oh, desh!" she exclaimed. "I beg your pardon!" said Preston, instinctively. "I'm awfully sorry," she added, and was gone. He trod out a spark on the carpet, and distinctly observed the two odors of scent and cigarette. He returned to his room, and his heart was beating. He had not seen her,—it was too dark to see any one on that landing,-but he had had a host of sensations all in a bunch, and he wanted to sort them out. There were her voice, her animation, her impetuosity, her mettle. "Oh, desh!" he repeated, but he could not get the effect as he had heard it. Despite the darkness he gathered that she was tall, and also that she was dressed in something light, some silky material the color of which he could not even guess. "Oh, desh!" he said again. That pleased him best of all. On the third evening the female had a companion. Preston could hear talking below him, and occasionally an outburst of clear laughter,-a rill of sweetness, it |