VOL. 102

No. 6

HOPELESS case," said the theo

Arist in the deck-chair.

His friend glanced after young Yarde.

"You think so?"

"I'm sure of it," replied the theorist, comfortably. "Nothing will ever happen to link him up to his environment." The friend smiled.

"I don't know about that," he said. "But the boy has n't much chance. Is it true that old Yarde makes him take too much to drink on principle says that the boy 's bright only when he 's drunk?"

"One hears things." The theorist shrugged. "He 's an inheritance of evil and folly on both sides. He is heir to a supreme selfishness. That brings me back to my favorite idea."

"Let's have it, Fred," said the goodnatured friend.

"Well, youth 's always incurably lonely, to start with. Can't help but be, because it 's disconnected with the life around it. And it takes time, and generally a shock of some sort, some acute disturbance of the usual, to produce the full contact of the individual boy with his environment. They call it waking up. 'Young So-and-so's

waked up at last,' they say. It is n't that. It is that something has brought So-and-so into contact with his surroundings, and for the first time he 's linked up and working in unison with life's machinery. When did you first wake up?”

"I suppose I had n't thought much about anything until my dad died and I had the girls to think for."

"Exactly. Under the shock of your father's death you lost the curious separateness of youth. Can you remember the moment of realization, of connection?"

"Queer, but I do. He 'd always taken in the morning paper when he unlocked the front door. The morning after the funeral I unlocked the front door and took in the paper for the first time. Everything, including myself, was just as usual except for the trouble we were in. There was the newspaper lying on the rubber mat on the front porch. I stooped to lift it. I can't describe to you what happened at that moment; but when I did that little thing he 'd always done, it was as if I'd consciously lifted and assumed all the hopes and responsibilities he 'd dropped."

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"Exactly." The theorist's voice was gentle, for the other man had nobly fulfilled those hopes, borne those responsibilities. "It was a bit of music did it for me, linked me up. Never mind that. Often it's a trivial means. But what possible link can there be in that case?"

They were silent, watching the boy who came lounging back along the steamer's rail. He was a boy any one would have watched. On the top of a long, rangy body was set a replica of the face that had made his mother notorious in many ways before she had married Gibson Yarde. He looked splendid enough in his white linens against the blue sea through which the Alcazar was steaming. And the friend suggested the obvious.

"Might not a woman do it?"

"No," said the theorist; "he 's been trained all his life to think of nothing but himself. And there 's no separation, no solitude, so hopeless as that. I've a belief, you know, that criminals are just those men who stay separate, who never get linked up."

"He 's young, Freddy."

"Yes," the theorist glanced at his watch,-"he 's young, and it 's ten forty-nine A.M., and he 's a little bit the worse for drink already."

Both men sat silent as the son of Gibson Yarde and Laure Delisle went by, swinging to the motion of the ship.

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He was a little bit the worse then; he was much the worse at ten fortynine P.M., when he stood by the rail watching the stars and wondering, wondering. He was cleverer when he was drunk. His father was quite correct; he was clever enough then to feel a half-savage wonder at life.

What was the matter with it? What was the matter with him? Why, with his money and his looks, was he always lonely? Sometimes, in these moods, he pictured life as a series of doors that he could see through, but never open; sometimes as a set of naked switches, and himself as a non-conductor incapable of completing the circuit.

He must have been pretty bad, because afterward his recollections of that night came in silence; he could never remember any noise, though there must have been plenty. As he recalled it, he was looking at the stars one minute, and the next they were reeling dizzily upward all in a mass, and he, with a great pressure on his chest, was looking down at more stars. Then he realized that the ship was heaved up and lying at a great slant, that the pressure on his chest was the weight of his own body across the rail, and that he was looking down at the stars reflected in the sea. He thought, "She's going over, and I 'm going down." And she went over, as you may read in the press of that time, and he went down.

He went down a long way. When he came to, he was lying on something that floated, a hatch-cover or the like. The sea was perfectly dark, perfectly quiet. He was alone in the middle of the limitless night. He was a microscopic atom broken off from life and lost. It was like the realization of a haunting dream. He shrieked aloud, like a child; and immediately from the darkness a voice answered him.

It was a voice so enormously deep and rich that for a moment the fancy pierced his unimaginative mind that the sea itself had replied to him. He looked down. The thing on which he lay was painted white and caught