and peculiar place in life.  “I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person that I was yesterday—­or even a half hour ago,” he thought with a determination to be completely miserable.  Yet even while the words were in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision.  The very attitude into which he had unconsciously fallen—­as he paused with his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he had picked up—­showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained emotional acting beyond the footlights.

“Then there’s nothing I can do but go straight to the devil,” he declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound in the mouth of an actor in his drama.

“Or write another play,” suggested Laura, while he started quickly and turned toward the door.

“I’ll never write another,” he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind.  “I wish now I hadn’t written this one.  I wouldn’t if I’d known.”

“Then it’s just as well that you didn’t,” she returned with a positive motherly assurance.  “My poor dear boy,” she added soothingly, “you are not the first man of twenty-five who has mistaken the literary mania for the passion of love, and I fear that you will not be the last.  There seems, curiously enough, to be a strange resemblance between the two emotions.  If you’d only look at me plainly without any of your lovely glamour you’ll see in a minute what nonsense it all is.  Why, you are all the time in your heart of hearts in love with some little blonde thing with pink cheeks who is still at school.”

He turned away in a passion of wounded pride; then coming back again he stood looking moodily down upon her.

“I’ll prove to you if it kills me that I’ve spoken the truth,” he declared, and it seemed to him that the words were not really what he meant to say—­that they came from him against his will because he had fitted them into the mouth of an imaginary character.

“Oh, please don’t,” she begged.

“I suppose I may still see you sometimes?” he enquired.

“Oh, dear, yes; whenever you like.”

Then while he stood there, hesitating and indignant, the servant brought her a card, and as she took it from the tray, he saw a flush that was like a pale flame overspread her face.

“It’s Mr. Kemper now,” she said.  “Why will you not stay and be good and forget?”

“I’d rather meet the devil himself at this minute,” he cried in a boyish rage that brought tears to his eyes.  “It seems to me that I spend half my life getting out of his way.”

“But don’t you like him?” she enquired curiously.  “Every one likes him, I think.”