phial to his lips), camping out.  In vain!  His spectre stalks me.  Dope is my only hope ...  Ah!  Destruction!  The black panther!  With a cry he suddenly vanished and the panel slid back.  An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite and said:  Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven.  He was gone.  Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host.  The seer raised his hand to heaven, murmuring:  The vendetta of Mananaun!  The sage repeated:  Lex TALIONIS.  The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.  Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased.  The mystery was unveiled.  Haines was the third brother.  His real name was Childs.  The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father.  He drank drugs to obliterate.  For this relief much thanks.  The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited.  No soul will live there.  The spider pitches her web in the solitude.  The nocturnal rat peers from his hole.  A curse is on it.  It is haunted.  Murderer’s ground.

What is the age of the soul of man?  As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood.  No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds.  A score of years are blown away.  He is young Leopold.  There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself.  That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.  Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas! a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins.  The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob’s pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before.  But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the mist.  Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons.  Who can say?  The wise father knows his own child.  He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there,