J JOHN was late next morning. He had not slept for many nights, and the heavy slumber of entire exhaustion fell on him towards dawn. It was nearly midday when he re-entered the sitting-room where he had sat up so late the night before.

He went to Archie's room to see whether he had come in; but it was empty.

He was impatient to be gone, to get away from that marble-topped side-table, and the horsehair chairs, and the gilt clock on the mantelpiece. At least, he thought he wished to get away from these things; but it was from himself that he really wanted to get away—from this miserable tortured self that was all that was left of him in this his hour of weakness and prostration; the hour which inevitably succeeds all great exertions of strength. How could he drag this wretched creature about with him? He abhorred himself; the thought of being with himself was intolerable. It seems hard that the nobler side of human nature, which can cheer and urge its weaker brother up such steep paths of duty and self-sacrifice, should desert us when the summit is achieved, leaving the weaker to wail unreproved over its bleeding feet and rent garments till we madden at the sound.

An overwhelming sense of loneliness fell on John as he sat waiting for Archie to come in. He had no strong, earnest, steadfast self to bear him company. He felt deserted, lost.

Who has not experienced it, that fierce depression and loathing of all life, which, though at the time we know it not, is only the writhing and fainting of the starved human affections! The very ordinary sources from which the sharpest suffering springs, shows us later on how narrow are the limits within which our common human nature works, and from which yet irradiate such diversities of pain.

Alphonse disturbed him at last to ask whether he and "Monsieur" would dine at table d'hÔte. "Monsieur," with a glance at Archie's door, had not yet come in.

John said they would both dine; and then, roused somewhat by the interruption, an idea struck him. Had Archie, in the excitement of the moment, gone back to England without telling him?

He went to the room, but there were no evidences of departure. On the bed the clothes were thrown which Archie had worn on the previous day. The gold watch John had given him was on the dressing-table. He had evidently left it there on purpose, not caring, perhaps, to risk taking it with him. All the paraphernalia of a man who studies his appearance were strewed on the table. There was his little moustache-brush, and phial of brilliantine to burnish it. John knew that he would never have left that behind. Archie had evidently intended to return.

In the mean while hour succeeded hour, but he did not come. That Archie should have been out all night was not surprising, but that he should be still out now in his evening clothes in the daytime, began to be incomprehensible. After a few premonitory tremors of misgiving, which, man-like, he laughed at himself for entertaining, John took alarm.

Evening fell, and still no Archie. And then a hideous night followed, in which John forgot everything in heaven above or earth beneath except Archie. The police were informed. The actress at whose house he had supped after the play was interviewed, but could only vociferate between her sobs that he had left her house with the remainder of her party in the early hours of the morning, and she had not seen him since.

Directly the office opened, John telegraphed to his colonel to know if he had returned to London. The answer came, "Absent without leave."

John remembered that he had only three days' leave, and that the third day was up yesterday. Archie would not have forgotten that.

A nightmare of a day passed. John had been out during the greater part of it, rushing back at intervals in the hope, that was no longer anything but a masked despair, of finding Archie in his rooms on his return.

In the dusk of the afternoon he came back once more, and peered for the twentieth time into the littered bedroom, which the frightened servants had left exactly as Archie had left it. He was standing in the doorway looking into the empty room, where a certain horror was beginning to gather round the familiar objects with which it was strewed, when a voice spoke to him.

It was the superintendent of police to whom he had gone long ago—the night before—when first the horror began. Alphonse, who had shown him up, was watching through the doorway.

The man said something in French. John did not hear him, but it did not matter much. He knew. They went downstairs together. Alphonse brought him his hat and stick. The other waiters were gathered in a little knot at the table d'hÔte door. A fiacre was waiting under the archway. John and the superintendent got into it, and it drove off at once without waiting for directions. They were lighting the lamps in the streets. The dusk was falling, falling like the shadow of death. They drove deeper and ever deeper into it.

Time ceased to be.

"Nous voiÇi, Monsieur," said the man, gravely, as they pulled up before a building, the long low outline of which was dimly visible.

John knew it was the Morgue.

He followed his guide down a white-washed passage into a long room. There was a cluster of people at the further end, towards which the man was leading him, and in the dusk there was a subdued whispering, and a sound of trickling water.

As they reached the further end, some one turned on the electric light, and it fell full on a man's figure on one of the slabs. A little crowd of people were peering through the glass screen at the toy which the Seine had tired of and cast aside.

"Ah! qu'il est beau," said a high woman's voice.

John shaded his eyes and looked.

The face was turned away, but John knew the hair, fair to whiteness in that brilliant light, as he had often seen it in London ball-rooms.

They let him through the glass screen which kept off the crowd, and, oblivious of the many eyes watching him, John bent over the slab and touched the clenched marble hand with the signet-ring on it which he had given him when they were at Oxford together.

Yes, it was Archie.

The dead face was set in the nervous grin with which he had been wont in life to meet the inevitable and the distasteful.

The blue pencillings of dissolution had touched to inexorable distinctness the thin lines of dissipation in the cheek and at the corners of the mouth. The death of the body had overtaken the creeping death of the soul. Their landmarks met.

The poor beautiful effeminate face, devoid of all that makes death bearable, stared up at the electric light.

An impotent overwhelming compassion, as for some ephemeral irresponsible being of another creation, who knows not how to guide itself in this grim world of law, and has wandered blindfold within the sweep of a vast machinery of which it knew nothing, wrung John's heart. He hid his face in his hands.