lips, and finally, in one sudden flash of memory, he came upon the clue. “Jeanne,” he said to himself, half aloud, “of course; that’s who it is; Jeanne.” Then, falling back unconsciously into the slang of college days, he added, “and she is a peach, too; Jack told the truth for once; no wonder he had his little affair.” And finally, as he mounted the steps of the broad piazza, he spoke again. “But pretty risky fun,” he muttered, “playing with fire, all right; there are some women in the world that a man wants to steer clear of, and I should put that girl down for one of them.”

He rang the bell, and almost immediately there appeared in answer a butler, thin, pale, and of uncertain age, but even to Helmar’s unpractised eye superlatively autocratic, hopelessly correct. He seemed, indeed, to be not so much a human being as the living embodiment of all known rules of social etiquette, condensed, as it were, into the final perfect expression of a type, before whom and whose vast store of knowledge one could only bow, humbly praying that the mistakes of honest ignorance might graciously be forgiven. Helmar, following in his wake, felt properly sensible of the honor done him, as he was ushered up the broad, winding staircase to the entrance of the big square room at the front of the house, where his guide stopped, and most decorously knocked. In answer a great voice called lustily, “Come in!” and the butler promptly stepped to one side. “Mr. Carleton, sir,” he observed, “left orders that you were to be admitted at once,” and thereupon, opening the door, he stood respectfully back, and as Helmar entered, closed it softly behind him.

Edward Carleton, attired in an old-fashioned quilted dressing-gown, was sitting up, reading, in his huge, high, square bed, his back propped with pillows innumerable. Well upward of seventy, he looked strong and active still; gaunt, with a wrinkled, weather-beaten face, a great bushy square-cut gray beard, and fiercely tufted eyebrows, while in the eyes beneath them, as he slowly took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and glanced up at his visitor, Helmar caught an expression of lurking, humorous kindliness that put him at once in mind of Jack Carleton himself.

As Helmar advanced, the old man reached out a gnarled and sinewy hand. “Good morning, sir,” he said pleasantly, “I take it that you’re Doctor Morrison’s young man.”

Helmar, as he took the proffered hand, smiled to himself at the old-fashioned quaintness of the phrase. “Yes, sir,” he answered, “that’s my professional title. In private life I’m Franz Helmar, and in either capacity very much at your service.”

Edward Carleton nodded. “Thank you,” he answered courteously, and then, more abruptly, “you think you’ve come out here to see a sick man, Doctor, but you haven’t. Just a bit of a chill—I managed to let myself get caught in that shower yesterday afternoon—and maybe a little fever with it. But I’m not sick. It’s all Henry’s nonsense. Just because he’s twenty years younger than I am, he has to look after me as if I were a baby.”

He spoke with assumed indignation, yet Helmar could detect in his tone a note of satisfaction at being so well cared for; and when he answered him, he aimed to fall in with the old man’s mood.

“Why, I think myself that I’m out here under false pretenses,” he said good-humoredly, “you don’t look at all like an invalid to me; but still the ounce of prevention, you know, it never does any harm. So many things nowadays start with a cold. It’s just as well to step right in and stop them before they get a hold on us. Now, then, we’ll see where we are, at any rate,” and as he spoke, he deftly slipped the little temperature tube under Edward Carleton’s tongue, and closed his fingers lightly on the lean brown wrist. A minute or two passed in silence, the old man’s eyes fixed on Helmar’s face with the scrutinizing interest of the patient who awaits the professional verdict. Then Helmar withdrew the tube, studied it an instant, nodded as if satisfied, asked a few questions, and then hastened to give his opinion.

“Oh, well,” he said reassuringly, “this is all right. We’ll fix you up, Mr. Carleton. Just a little tonic, and a few days’ rest, and you’ll be as good as new; better than new, really, because a day or two off is a benefit to anybody, at any time. You’d better stay in bed, though, to-day, I think; and personally I rather envy you. I see you have good company.”

He pointed as he spoke, to the three stout little volumes that lay by Mr. Carleton’s side. Roderick Random was the first; Tom Jones, the second; Tristram Shandy, the third. Their owner nodded in pleased assent.

“Yes, indeed,” he answered, “they’ll last me through the day, all right. I never get tired of them, Doctor. I was just reading, when you came in, how Tom Bowling came to see the old curmudgeon who was about to die. ‘So, old gentleman,’ he says, ‘you’re bound for the other shore, I see, but in my opinion most damnably ill-provided for the voyage’; and later on, after the old fellow’s dead, he tells some one, that asks after him, that they might look for him ‘somewhere about the latitude of hell.’ There’s good, sound, human nature for you. Smollett knew his sailors, and the rest of his world, too, and enjoyed them both, I imagine. And he wasn’t a hypocrite; that’s what I like most about him. He saw things as they were.”

Helmar smiled. “I agree with you,” he answered, “but the modern school of readers doesn’t care for him, just the same. He’s either too simple for them, or too coarse; I don’t know which.”

Edward Carleton looked his scorn. “Modern school!” he ejaculated. “Let me tell you, sir, I have but very little opinion of your modern school, writers or readers either. But Henry stands up for ’em, and brings ’em all to me to read. Good Lord above, the different kinds! There’s some that tell you whether John Smith had one egg for breakfast, or two, and whether either of ’em was bad, and if it was, what John Smith said to his wife, and what she said to him—and Henry claims those books are modern classics. Then he’s got another lot—romantic school, I believe they are—all dashing cavaliers and lovely ladies and flashing swords and general moonshine—stuff about fit for idiots and invalids; and last of all—” he glared at Helmar as if he were the unfortunate embodiment of all the literary sins of the day day—“he’s got a crowd—Heaven knows what he calls ’em; the pig-sty school’s my name—that seem to be having a regular game; trying to see which can write the dirtiest book, and yet have it stop just enough short of the line so they can manage to get it published without the danger of having it suppressed. And the mean, hypocritical excuses they make—they’re always teaching a moral lesson, you know, or something like that. It makes me sick, sir; it makes me sick; and I don’t hesitate to tell Henry so, either.”

Helmar nodded assentingly, and yet, with a twinkle in his eye, he could not resist the temptation to reach forward and pick up from the bed the volume of Sterne. “I agree with a great deal of what you say, sir,” he answered, “especially the latter part, and yet—it isn’t wholly a modern vice. There was old Rabelais, for instance, and his imitators, and even Tristram here I suppose you could hardly recommend for a Sunday-school.”

Edward Carleton was no casuist. He loved to fight, but he always fought