bit and roastin' a goose I'd 'a' been philanderin' far and wide, Prudey, and well ye know it now, my poor gel well ye know it now!" The Colonel sighed and snapped his suspenders with his thumbs, and continued: "And then Lally Rookh, Archimedes, poor Lally Rookh, she's her father's daughter by marriage, and blood kin to the chained Turk who sits in the back of my head, gnawing his chains and thanking God for the safety and the comfort they bring him."

The reply of Archimedes is unimportant except that it prompted these words from the Colonel: "It's the young Doctor I'm really sorry for, if ye must know the truth. Haven't I tramped the cobblestones of Dublin, across the bridge and down the quay, and up the quay and over the bridge, all of a winter's night, with the vultures of shame and hate and saints forgive me! - murder rippin' my heart to shreds on the weddin' night of Kate McGarrity, dead these thirty years. Ah, my little man, my game little doctor man, ye'll be salvin' a blister on your poor soul the long score of years till you're passin' forty! And I'm wonderin' now "— and the Colonel gazed wistfully at the stars as he spoke "if Prudey and Kate will be

meetin' betimes and havin' a bit of a tear and a smile in their tea in the Milky Way yonder as they talk me over!"

The autumn sank into winter, and still the town smiled at the battle for Lalla Longford. We Americans make a pretence of civilisation that keeps us from claws and fists and knives and guns in the struggles for our mates. But the fierceness of the fight is prolonged only because it has no climax, no expression in terms of blood and muscle. How the town could laugh at the tense, strained face of the Doctor, or the lowering animal wrath that loomed big in his slow-moving, dogged rival, is only explicable on the theory that it is always funny to see a man act the beast, or a beast try to act the man. But our sense of humour blinds our eyes to the tragedy that inheres in every yielding of the man to the beast, or aspiration of the beast toward man.

The quarrel that Nixon knew he would force between the Doctor and the girl came in January. The Doctor sent for his ring and got it; but he did not know that she sent it covered with kisses of remorse. Then the Colonel took her away to the city for a week of grand opera, and Wagner har

rowed her heart. So she wrote passionate letters to both her lovers, and the big man came to the city and got her.

The boy who brought the telegraphic press report one Saturday afternoon came stumbling along, reading the sheet. He handed it to the society editor, who met him in the corridor, and she cried to the man in the business office: "I win! I win! They've eloped to New York!"

The office force came crowding round to read the despatch, and there it was, in plain typewritten characters the story of Lalla Rookh and the Professor, and the Colonel chasing them furiously to the station in a cab and then throwing kisses after them as they stood on the rear of the departing train.

When they had all gone out of her room the society editor called: "Charley, come here!" And when Charley came she shut the door and whispered: "And not five minutes ago, as I was in the post-office for the afternoon mail, I met Doctor Kurtlin his box is right above ours and Charley, if that girl hadn't written him a letter written Doctor a letter that he got just now.

- of that! Why, it must have been just before she left with Nixon. I saw it drop from his box, address up; it's her big box-car handwriting, and it wasn't a little old ta-ta or by-by; it was a big fat letter!"

Then in a pause her newspaper sense came to her, and she hurried to a door and called: "Herman, Doctor Kurtlin got a letter a minute ago from Lalla Rookh. You send one of the boys over to his office and maybe he'll talk send Jim; he can fight if he has to!" The girl came back to her desk by the telephone and sat looking at the advertising solicitor. "Charley," she said, "listen to me: If that girl lives to be thirty, she's going to make a big first-page, black-head, three-decked story for this paper. She is full of the kind of dynamite that makes news!"

"Well, don't you go telling Archimedes your dreams, Elsie," answered the solicitor; "he's that soft on the Colonel he'll order the story killed five years in advance and cut down to-day's story to a society item on the third page!" And with that they fell to their work.

PART II

But alas for the futility of prophecy! The only copy Mrs. Lalla Rookh Nixon made during the first five years of her married life was birth notices! Three notices appeared in fairly regular succession, and the last notice chronicled twins. Then news of that character conspicuously quit coming from Longheath, where the happy couple had settled down with the Colonel. The phrase "settled down" perhaps may apply to Gregory Nixon, who settled down to a steady brilliancy of work in his profession; the phrase may even have applied to the Colonel, who was enjoying to the full the long afternoon of his vigorous life, as one on a quiet perennial spree who lives in fear of the return of somber sobriety; but "settled down" was no phrase to use on Lalla Rookh. The current of life was strong in her. But after the birth of the twins she seemed to tire of the game of domesticity. Almost with a click or bang or whack she slammed the door on the picture she had been making of herself as she appeared in public with her children, rather over-dressed and bedizened, grouped beautifully round her. Then she opened