for they chopped the wood and built the fires and made the horses’ coats shine—for he and his father would have scorned to walk, and went galloping like the wind everywhere. The forests about were filled with small brown cats, tremendously furry, with long whiskers and sharp, beedy black eyes, and sometimes they would hunt these on horseback; but they never caught them, because the cats could run just a little bit faster than the horses.

Christmas time at home was not so very exciting, but at Wishing-House what a time they had! Then all the savages and their wives and children received presents, and he and his father had a dreadfully scary shivery time remembering them all, because some had so many children they ran out of names and had to use numbers instead. So there was always the harrowing fear that one might inadvertently be left out, and sometimes they couldn’t remember the last one till the very final minute. After the Christmas turkey, the oldest and blackest savage of all would come in where his father and he sat at the table, with a pudding as big as the gold chariot in the circus, and the pudding, by some magic spell, would set itself on fire, while he carried it round the table, with all the other savages marching after him. This was the most awe-inspiring spectacle of all. Christmases at other places were a long way apart, but they came as often as they were wanted at Wishing-House, which, he recalled, was very often indeed.

John Valiant felt an odd beating of the heart and a tightening of the throat, for he saw another scene, too. It was the one hushed and horrible night, after the spell had failed and the door had refused to open for a long time, when dread things had been happening that he could not understand, when a big man with gold eye-glasses, who smelled of some curious sickish-sweet perfume, came and took him by the hand and led him into a room where his father lay in bed, very gray and quiet.

The white hand on the coverlet had beckoned to him and he had gone close up to the bed, standing very straight, his heart beating fast and hard.

“John!” the word had been almost a whisper, very tense and anxious, very distinct. “John, you’re a little boy, and father is going away.”

“To—to Wishing-House?”

The gray lips had smiled then, ever so little, and sadly. “No, John.”

“Take me with you, father! Take me with you, and let us find it!” His voice had trembled then, and he had had to gulp hard.

“Listen, John, for what I am saying is very important. You don’t know what I mean now, but sometime you will.” The whisper had grown strained and frayed, but it was still distinct. “I can’t go to the Never-Never Land. But you may sometime. If you ... if you do, and if you find Wishing-House, remember that the men who lived in it ... before you and me ... were gentlemen. Whatever else they were, they were always that. Be ... like them, John ... will you?”

“Yes, father.”

The old gentleman with the eye-glasses had come forward then, hastily.

“Good-night, father—”

He had wanted to kiss him, but a strange cool hush had settled on the room and his father seemed all at once to have fallen asleep. And he had gone out, so carefully, on tiptoe, wondering, and suddenly afraid.

CHAPTER IV

THE TURN OF THE PAGE

John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there had been drops on his face.

Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on the stub, looking up with a wry smile. “To come down to brass tacks,” he muttered, “when I’ve settled everything (thank heaven, I don’t owe my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd dollars, a passé motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!”

Everything else he had disposed of—everything but the four-footed comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master’s immaculate boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes. “But I’d not sell you, old chap,” he said softly; “not a single lick of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!”

He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub. Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than that a month ago on a ball at Sherry’s! This morning he had been rich; to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a porcelain mandarin.

What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by an importunate tradesman. And he had never tried to earn a dollar in his life; as to current methods of making a living, he was as ignorant as a Pueblo Indian.

What did others do? The men he knew who joked of their poverty and their debts, and whose hilarious habit it was to picture life as a desperate handicap in which they were forever “three jumps ahead of the sheriff”, somehow managed to cling to their yachts and their stables. Few of his friends had really gone “smash”, and of these all but one had taken themselves speedily and decently off. He thought of Rod Creighton, the one failure who had clung to the old life, achieving for a transient period the brilliant success of living on his friends. When this ended he had gone on the road for some champagne or other. Everybody had ordered from him at the start. But this, too, had failed. He had dropped out of the clubs and there had at last befallen an evil time when he had come to haunt the avenue, as keen for stray quarters as any pan-handler. Where was Creighton now, he wondered?

Across the avenue was Larry Treadwell’s brokerage office. Larry had a brain for business; as a youthful scamp in knickerbockers he had been as sharp as a steel-trap. But what did he, John Valiant, know of business? Less than of law! Why, he was not fit to smirk behind a counter and measure lace insertion for the petticoats of the women he waltzed with! All he was really fit for was to work with his hands!

He thought of a gang of laborers he had seen that afternoon breaking the asphalt with crowbars. What must it be to toil through the clammy cold of winter and the smothering fur-heat of summer, in some revolting routine of filth and unredeemable ugliness? He looked down at his supple white fingers and shivered.

He rose grimly and dragged his chair facing the window. The night was balmy and he looked down across the darker sea of reefs, barred like a gigantic checker-board by the shining lines of streets, to where the flashing electric signs of the theater district laid their wide swath of colored radiance. The manifold calls of the street and the buzz of trolleys made a dull tonal background, subdued and far-away.

To be outside! All that light and color and comfort and pleasure would hum and sparkle on just the same, though he was no longer within the circle of its effulgence—slaving perhaps, he thought with a twisted smile, at some tawdry occupation that called for no experience, to pay for a meal in some second-rate restaurant and a pallet in some shabby-genteel, hall