domesticity."

"You with all this comfort—a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about. Time will tell."

I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts.

"Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college when you were teaching me?"

"Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You've never been a teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies, or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes the teacher's golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You'll admit you haven't set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet."

"All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the devil of a fix and you are talking like Job's comforters."

"Yes," he agreed, "I suppose I am. But in the end it was not the comforters but events that pulled Job up. Await events with resignation and expectancy, Randolph, my lad, and play the game. Stake your coin and wait until the wheel stops and see what happens."

"A fine teacher you are!" I laughed at him, albeit mirthlessly.

"No good at all," he assented cheerfully, knocking his pipe against the ash tray and pocketing the noisome thing. "And didn't I chuck teaching the minute events made it possible? Events, my boy; they are the teacher and the deities to tie to. Set up a little altar to the great god Event—right here in your perfumed little temple. That's what I should do," he concluded, muttering into his beard.

"Incidentally," he added, "I'm getting extraordinarily hungry."

"Oh, sorry," I murmured. "Glad you're here to eat with me, anyway. It enables me to put off breaking the news of my coming marriage to Griselda."

"What—you haven't told her yet?" shouted Dibdin, sitting up in his chair. "That fine, upright Highland lassie? Then you're no disciple of mine! Face things with courage and face 'em fairly, Randolph. Go and tell her now! I'll wait here with my highly moral support."

"I—I can't," I blurted miserably.

"Yes, you can," he insisted with obstinacy. "Go and do it now."

With a gesture of desperation I pressed the bell.

"If I am going to tell her anything," I mumbled between my teeth, "I'll say it right here." Dibdin laughed ghoulishly.

"This cowardice—this shrinking from life," he philosophized detestably—"that's what our kind of education brings about."

Griselda appeared at the door.

"You rang, Mr. Randolph."

"Yes—er—yes, Griselda," and I felt myself idiotically hot and flushed. "I wanted to say—" and beads of perspiration prickled my forehead. Then in desperation, I stammered out,

"Mr. Dibdin, Griselda—he is dining here to-night—that's all, Griselda!"

Dibdin's laugh rattled throatily in the room. How I hated him at that moment! Griselda swept us with an impenetrable glance.

"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.

"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling trunks."

"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.

"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."

"A lot you know about life!"

"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then before the patient Griselda."

"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."

It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these foolish notes.

It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them. It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes.

If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy.

Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material concerning Brunetto Latini—the teacher of Dante. Among the few ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto's works, the "Tesoro" and the "Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore, something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own greatness to the teacher.

But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks.

Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we're married. But she will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks.

There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante's immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness? No more than with marriage.

Bur-r-r! The room is cold. Sparge ligna super foco, as cheerful old Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.

My nerves must be a shade off color to-night. I could have sworn a moment ago, as the room grew chilly, that my sister Laura was standing before me. It is my guilty conscience, I suppose. Too late to call her now. Besides, the telephone is no doubt still "out of order." Poor Laura! I saw her, white as death, with tears running down her drawn cheeks. What things are human nerves when a bit unstrung! I shall go and see Laura to-morrow.

I have had my conversation with Griselda and it