Papa, my heart will break itself apart. Papa, can't you know enough to comfort you little girl? I can't live wivout my Loveliness. Oh, Papa! Papa!"

This was in the decline of March. The winds went down, and the rains came on. The snow slid from the streets of the university town, and withdrew into dingy patches about the roots of trees and fences, and in the shady sides of cold back yards. The mud yawned ankle-deep, and dried, and was not, and was dust beneath the foot. Crocuses blazed in the gardens of the faculty,—royal purple, gold, and wax-white lamps set in the young and vivid grass. The sun let down his mask and looked abroad, and it was April. The newsboy, the carrier and the cab-driver laughed for very joy of living. But when they passed the professor's house they did not laugh. It came on to be the heart and glory of the spring, and the warm days melted into May. But the little dog had not been found.

The professor had exhausted hope and ingenuity in the dreary quest. The State, one might say without exaggeration, had been dragged for that tiny dumb thing,—seven pounds' weight of life and tenderness. Money had been poured like love upon the vain endeavor. Rewards of reckless proportion appealed from public places and from public columns to the blank eyes that could not or did not read. The great detective force, whose name is familiar from sea to sea, had supplemented the useless search of the local police and of the city press. And all had equally failed. The "dog banditti" had done their work too well.

Loveliness had sunk out of sight like forgotten suffering in a scene of joy.

In the window seat, propped with white pillows, "lame and lovely," Adah sat. The empty embroidered gray cushion lay beside her. Sometimes she patted the red puppies softly with one thin little hand; she allowed no one else to touch the cushion.

"Till Loveliness comes home," she said. In the window, silent, pale, and seeing everything, she watched. But Loveliness did not come home.

"TILL LOVELINESS COMES HOME"

The pitiful thing was that the child herself was so changed. She had wasted to a little wraith. For some time she had not walked without her crutch. Now she scarcely walked at all. At the first she had sobbed a good deal, in downright childish fashion; then she wept silently; but now she did not cry any more,—she did but watch. Her sight had grown unnaturally keen, like that of pilots; she gazed out of great eyes, bright, and dry, and solemn. Already she had taken on the look of children whose span of time is to be short. She weakened visibly.

At first, her father took her out with him in the cab, so she should feel that she was conducting the search herself. But she had grown too feeble for this exertion. Sometimes, on such drives, she saw cruel sights,—animals suffering at the black tempers of men or the diabolic jests of boys; and she was hurried home, shivering and sobbing. When night came she would ask for the Yorkshire's bed to be put beside her own, and with trembling fingers would draw up the crimson blankets over the crimson mattress, as if the dog had been between them. Then she would ask the question that haunted her most:—

"Mamma, who will put Loveliness into a little baxet to sleep, and cover him up? Papa, Papa, will they be kind to Loveliness?"

Stormy nights and days were always the hardest.

"Will Loveliness be out and get wet? Will he shiver like 'e black dog I saw to-day? Will he have warm milk for his supper? Is there anybody to rub him dry and cuddle my Loveliness?"

To divert the child from her grief proved impossible. They took her somewhere, in the old, idle effort to change the place and help the pain; but she mourned so, "because he might come home, and nobody see him but me," that they brought her back.

The president of the university, who was a dogless and childless man, presented the bereaved household with a mongrel white puppy, purchased under the amiable impression that it was of a rare, Parisian breed. The distinguished man cherished the ignorant hope of bestowing consolation. But the invalid child, with the sensitiveness of invalid children, refused to look at the puppy, who was returned to his donor, and constituted himself henceforth the tyrant and terror of that scholastic household.

As the weather grew warmer, little Adah failed and sank. It came on to be the bloom of the year, and she no longer left the house.

The carrier and the cab driver lifted their hats in silence now, when they passed the window where the little girl sat, and the newsboy looked up with a sober face, like that of a man. The faculty and the neighbors did not ask, "How is the child?" but always, "Have you heard from the dog?" The doctor began to call daily. He did not shake his head,—no doctor does outside of an old-fashioned story,—and he smiled cheerfully enough inside the house; but when he came out of it, to his carriage, he did not smile. So the spring mellowed, and it was the first of June.

One night, the poor professor sat trying to put into shape an impossible thesis on an incomprehensible subject (it was called The Identity of Identity and Non-Identity), for Commencement delivery in his department. Pulling aside some books of reference that he needed, he dragged to view a pamphlet from the lowest shelf of the revolving bookcase. Then he saw the marks of the Yorkshire's teeth and claws on the pamphlet corners, and, sadly smiling, he opened and read.

The Commencement thesis on The Identity of Identity and Non-Identity was not corrected that night. The professor of psychology sat moulded into his study chair, rigid, with iron lips and clenched hands, and read the pamphlet through, every word, from beginning to end. For the first time in his life, this eminent man, wise in the wisdom of the world of mind, and half educated in the practical affairs of the world of matter, studied for himself the authenticated records of the torments imposed upon dumb animals in the name of science.

As an instructed man, of course this subject was not wholly unfamiliar to him, but it was wholly foreign. Hitherto he had given it polite and indifferent attention, and had gone his ways. Now he read like a man himself bound, without anæsthesia, beneath the knife. Now he read for the child's sake, with the child's mind, with the child's nerves, and with those of the little helpless thing for whom her life was wasting. He tore from his shelves every volume, every pamphlet that he owned upon the direful subject which that June night opened to his consciousness; and he read until the birds sang.

With brain on fire, he crept, in the brightness of coming day, to his wife's side.

"Tired out, dear?" she asked gently. Then he saw that she too had not slept.

"Adah has such dreams," she explained; "cruel things,—all the same kind."

"About the dog?"

"Always about the dog. I have been sitting up with her. She is—not as strong as—not quite"—

The professor set his teeth when he heard the mother's moan. When she had sunk into broken rest he stole back to his study, and locked out of sight the pamphlet which Loveliness had chewed. So, with the profound and scientific treatises on the subject, arguing and illustrating this way and that (some of these had cuts and photogravures which would haunt the imagination for years), he crowded the whole out of reach. His own brain