Her bewildered eyes turned from the silent, unfamiliar face among the satin cushions, to the living face in the moonlight,—­the young, brown eyes, the short, brown hair falling forward over the left temple, the erect, elastic figure, the strong loving hands stretching out to her.

She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she had lost.

“Felix,” she sobbed, and, blindly groping to reach what she feared was a hallucination, she stumbled down the steps, and was caught up in the arms flung wide to catch her, and which folded about her as if forever.  She sighed his name again, upon the passionate young lips which had inherited the great love she had put aside so long before.

* * * * *

As the last words died away, the Critic drew himself up and laughed.

He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the envelope he had called a “property,” and he had told it well.

The laugh broke the spell, and the Doctor echoed it heartily.

“All right, old man,” said the Critic, “you owed me that laugh.  You’re welcome.”

“I was only thinking,” said the Doctor, his face still on a broad grin, “that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist, and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have been.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said the Critic, “That was only improvisatore—­that’s no sample.”

“Ho, ho!  I’ll bet you anything that the manuscript is up in your trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this idea was proposed,” said the Doctor, still laughing.

“No, that I deny,” replied the Critic, “but as I am no poseur, I will own that I wrote it years ago, and rewrote it so often that I never could forget it.  I’ll confess more than that, the story has been ‘declined with thanks’ by every decent magazine in the States and in England.  Now perhaps some one will tell me why.”

“I don’t know the answer,” said the Youngster, seriously, “unless it is ‘why not?’”

“I shouldn’t wonder if it were sentimental twaddle,” sighed the Journalist, “but I don’t know.”

“I noticed,” expostulated the Critic, “that you all listened, enthralled.”

“Oh,” replied the Doctor, “that was a tribute to your personal charm.  You did it very well.”

“Exactly,” said the Critic, “if editors would let me read them my stories, I could sell them like hot cakes.  I never believed that Homer would have lived as long as he has, if he had not made the reputation of his tales by singing them centuries before any one tried to read them.  Now no one dares to say they bore him.  The reading public, and the editors who cater to it, are just like some stupid theatrical managers I know of, who will never let an author read a play to them for fear that he may give the play some charm that the fool theatrical man might not have felt from mere