"What is the urgent necessity? I have just held my afternoon mission service, and I am very tired. Noel, why are you so insistent?"

"Perhaps it has been borne in upon my 'subliminal consciousness' that if you wait too long you may possibly regret it. Once or twice I have found profit in following a rule my old nurse taught me when I wore kilts: 'Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day.' No 'dÆmon' squats at my ear, and I claim no mantic illumination, still I should be glad to know you will make that visit at once."

"You fear the poor boy is dying?"

"Not immediately, but he appears hopelessly ill, and needs all the kind words you may find yourself better able to utter than any one else. Moreover, it would be well that you should see his mother, who is away at work during the week, and as you expect to leave the city so soon, this will be the most suitable opportunity for you to meet her at home. Poor, fierce, bitter soul! She has no milk of human kindness left; it soured and has become acrid—intensely mordacious."

"She belongs then to the unhappy class of frail women who go swiftly to utter wreck in all large cities, where sin is arrayed in rose color and gilt. Strange that the boy of such a creature should remind one of the infant St. John or a seraph of Angelico's."

"Some fragments of her history lead me to believe that she is as trustworthy and pure as any woman to whom you preach. Her morality is beyond cavil, but theoretically she seems to have gone wild among the hedges and ditches of socialism."

"You consider her a conscientious, good woman?"

"As far as I can ascertain she lives irreproachably, bar associating with anarchists. I surmise some man has treated her cruelly, or she thinks so, and now she——"

Mr. Herriott rose, looked at his watch, and laughed.

"Temple, do you recollect one summer night under the elms, when rehearsing for the Greek play, Prescott Winthrop declaimed the herdsman's message from the 'BacchÆ,' and emphasized the portrait of Agave in the frenzy of the Thiasus strangling a calf and fondling a wolf's whelp? To-day Leighton's mother recalled that scene, but she is not dancing to meet Bromius—only hunting revenge on all mankind. Ah, you are going? I suggest a cautious approach. Leave the carriage out of sight, and boldly flourish the promised book as an open sesame. You of the cassock clan enjoy privileges denied to us, the ungirdled sons of Belial. After all, you may prove the deus ex machina, and through the poor little lad may be able to lay a healing touch on the mother's sick soul. Come to my rooms after your visit, and we will say good-bye until I get back from my long jaunt."

An hour later Father Temple made his way into the tenement house, through a noisy mob of children romping on the pavement, and when he entered the narrow hall outside din was conquered by the deep, swelling music of "Quis est Homo," wailing from a violoncello held between the knees of a man sitting half way up the stairs, a thin, stooping old figure with shaggy grey hair, and bearded as a Welsh harper. The priest ascended, and the musician edged closer to the wall to allow him passage way, but he merely nodded his bowed head, and the solemn strains rose and fell like the sobbing moan of waves settling to calm after lashing blasts. Father Temple lifted his finger.

"Mrs. Dane lives on the next floor?"

"Go ub. She vill see no briests, but her door is oben for de child to hear de music he loves. Dear leedle boy is sick, and my cello sounds more better here dan closer."

He shut his eyes and continued playing. Opposite the undraped west window of the room above, an alley stretched, making clear pathway for the sinking sun that poured a parting flood of radiance into the apartment, and upon the cot where, propped up with pillows, the boy clasped his arms around his knees, and listened, quiet and happy. Between cot and window his mother sat, facing the back of her chair, on top of which she rested one arm, leaning her brow upon it, while the other hand, lying on the cot, slowly stroked Leighton's bare feet. Having washed her hair earlier in the day, it was now brushed out over her shoulders to dry in the sunshine, and the bright mass of waving tendrils seemed to clothe her with light. On the floor were scattered several newspaper sheets—"The Chain Breaker"—and across her knee lay an open copy of "Battle-cry of Labor." Only the mellow voice of the cello sounded, and the room was sweet with the breath of Mr. Herriott's white carnations nodding in a blue bowl on the table. Standing a moment at the threshold, Father Temple's eyes fastened on the veil of golden locks falling to the floor, and his heart leaped, then seemed to cease beating as he recalled a vision of the far West, where just such glittering strands had been twined around his fingers.

"Oh, my St. Hyacinth's preacher!"

At Leighton's glad cry his mother raised her head, started up, and, moving forward a few steps, swept back her hair, holding it with both hands. Before her stood the tall, thin figure in the long, black habit of his Order, cord-girded at the waist; with a soft wool hat and book in one hand; a clean-shaven face, pale, sensitive, scholarly, and suggestive of "lauds and prime," of asceticism without peace, and of brooding regret.

He recognized every line in her lovely features, from the large pansy eyes and delicate, over-arching brows to the perfect oval molding of cheek and chin, and the full, downward curve of scarlet lips. Love is so keen of vision it pierces the changes wrought by ripening years, and he knew the dear face. She did not suspect, love had been dead so long, and she had buried all tender memories in its neglected grave.

"I am surprised a Romish priest wastes his time coming here, and I have no welcome to offer you, because I wish no visitors."

With a swift movement he closed the door, dropped hat and book, and came close to her. The sudden glow on his cheek, the light of exultation in his sad eyes transformed him.

"Look at me. Don't you know me? Look—look!"

Eye to eye they watched each other, and at the sound of his deep, tender, quivering voice recollection smote hard upon her heart, and a vague, shivering pain drove the blood from her face, but she fought the suggestion.

"You are unknown to me."

"I am Vernon Pembroke Temple, and you are Nona, my wife! My Nona—my own wife——"

Words failed him, and he held out his arms. She recoiled, throwing up her hands with a gesture of loathing, and stood as if turned to stone, so strangely hard was a face where eyes kindled and burned with the pent hatred and scorn of long years of sore trial.

"You had not sins enough to sink your soul without adding hypocrisy? A preacher! A priest! Cowardice, perjury, moral leprosy, skulking under a long cloak as black as what is left of your vile heart!"

Each word fell like a red-hot flail, but he did not wince, and neither father nor mother heard the low wail from the cot where childish arms covered a face white with horror.

"You think, you believe I intentionally and pre-meditatedly deserted you, and in your ignorance of facts you certainly had cause to despise me, but——"

"Think—believe! As if it were possible to doubt the villainy planned! The crime you so carefully committed against a mere child, knowing she was a helpless victim, believing she could never redress her awful wrongs. As if you had set a trap and caught an innocent, happy bird, and then broken its wings and tossed it to screaming hawks! Coward—coward as you always were—how dare you face me?"

"Nona, dear Nona—" He put out his hand appealingly, but she struck it aside with stinging force, and stepped backward.

"Out of my sight, or I call the police."

She pointed to the door. He turned, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and his eyes steadily met the challenge in hers. The banked, smouldering fires that flashed up must burn lower before he could plead. So they stood: he flushed, smiling, happy; she shaken by a tempest of rage that blanched her to a livid pallor and set all the glittering rings of hair quivering, as if innumerable golden serpents coiled and uncoiled around her trembling form.

In the pause he lifted the hanging ends of the knotted cord.

"Do you understand what this habit means?"

"Don't I? A holy cloak to hide every sin that makes this world a hotter hell than even God could fashion—if God were possible. You drape it over the ten commandments, blotting them out, while you sing psalms, and rob the toiling poor, and ruin young lives, and murder innocent souls. Oh, yes, to my sorrow, I understand all it means!"

"It means my consecration to celibacy when you fled from me, and I had exhausted all efforts to find you."

"Celibacy! Celibacy! I needed no nunnery to help me keep clean and pure, but you ran behind monastery walls to protect yourself from retribution at a wronged woman's hands. Coward from first to last! When I fled from you? You must indeed be possessed of the devil to dare such language to me."

"Nona, there has been some awful mistake——"

"Yes, a mistake that I was not scalped, or that a merciful bolt of lightning did not strike me dead that day—that cursed day—when first I set my eyes on your false, treacherous face! If you could only know how I hate, despise, utterly despise the bare thought, much more the horrible sight of you!"

"No wonder, since circumstances were apparently all against me at——"

"Circumstances are no shelter for honest, honorable men, if there be any left; and the hard, bitter, murderous facts of your shameful life would find you out if you dodged under the very throne of the God you blaspheme by professing!"

"Will you listen to the truth?"

"You could not speak it if you tried. I listened to you once too often, and you wrecked me, and I am no longer a fool."

"Why did you leave Thompsonville after you received my letters, and the money I sent you, and when you knew I was coming there to take you away with me?"

For an instant she looked at him with startled curiosity, then laughed hysterically.

"I left Thompsonville because you wrote no letters, sent no money, and took no notice of my frantic appeals for help in my hour of horrible trial. A sick woman with a frail, feeble baby, facing starvation, abandoned, slandered, and trampled in the mud, I could only snatch at the hand held out to me by the one man I have found honest, honorable, loyal, and true, as he was pitying and kind."

"But when I reached Thompsonville Delia Brown told me——"

Her scornful laugh drowned his words.

"'When you reached Thompsonville' in your dreams—after a night's carousal at college! Even a congenital idiot would sicken at that."

No shadow of impatience crossed his happy countenance; the intensity of her scoffing bitterness was part of his punishment—the harvest that sprang from his own sowing—and he must not complain until she understood fully.

"I can prove that I went to Thompsonville, and I have the sworn testimony of Delia Brown that she delivered into your hands my letters and the package of money I sent to her care through the express agent. On a scrap of paper I have also a receipt in pencil from you to Delia Brown."

She shook her head and smote her palms together.

"Forgeries one and all. I would not believe you on your oath, unless the grave yawned, and Leighton Dane—dead six years—came back as witness in your favor."

"'He was the handsome Spanish-looking man' Delia Brown told me stole my wife and child and disappeared suddenly—going to Florida or Cuba to grow bananas—when you heard I was coming to Thompsonville?"

"He was a good old man, my father's best friend, who took his place as teamster—and when I was literally driven out of the cabin one rainy night by my stepmother, he was the only human being who believed I was not vile. He pitied me and carried me in one of the Government wagons to Thompsonville, and paid my board until I was able to earn my bread by helping Delia Brown wash and iron. His term was expiring soon, and when he started back to his home in California, he came by to see if I needed anything.

"Finding I was ill in body, distracted in mind, desperate, because I knew then I was utterly deserted, and had no hope of help, he offered to carry me West and protect me on account of his friendship for my father. Oh, bless him—for ever and ever! He made an humble little home for us, and shielded and respected me, and pitied and believed in me with all the strength of his great, true heart, and was a second and a much better father to me in my shameful desolation and helplessness. He adopted me and my baby, and when he died he left his small savings to us; and so I named my outcast little one Leighton Dane for the one loyal friend who helped me to feed and clothe him when his own father rejected and abandoned him. I had no proof except the certificate you made me swear I would conceal for two years, and your ally, the devil, worked well for you when the mice nesting in my trunk cut it into shreds while I was ill. The chaplain and Ransom Hill were dead; I had none to speak for me; but Mr. Dane believed my words, and he put his big hand on my head and comforted me.

"'Poor little girl, don't worry; just be easy in your mind, for I know you are telling the truth. I know you are good as your own baby, and if every mouth in America swore against you I would trust you as I always trusted my own mother.'"

A mist clouded her eyes, as dew softens the tint of a violet, but she clenched her hands, and bit her lip hard to still its tremor, adding with sullen emphasis:

"In all these black years the one star of comfort I can ever see shines in the assurance that the only truly good man I have found, who knew me well, respected and trusted me as he did his dead mother."

"You never saw or heard of the advertisements I published in various papers, asking you to inform me where I could find you?"

The contempt in her ringing answer stung him like a whip-lash.

"People who are neither 'lost, strayed, nor stolen' spend no time hunting for imaginary advertisements that never go to press."

"You shall read them in the papers with their printed dates. Copies have been filed and preserved with reports of unsuccessful search from chiefs of police in Louisiana and Florida, whom I paid to hunt for some trace of you. They are deposited in a Boston bank, with a sum of money placed to your credit—all to be delivered to the order of Nona Moorland Temple. Write to Noah Giles, cashier of Orchard Street Bank. I will telegraph, vouching for your right to the tin box bearing your name, and in two days you shall possess absolute proof that I am not the hardened scoundrel you think me. Weak, rash, cowardly I certainly was, but as God hears me, never forgetful, never unfaithful, never intending the wrong for which you have suffered so frightfully."

The gaze of each fastened on the other, neither had noticed the cot or its occupant.

Leighton slipped slowly down till his feet touched the floor, and he clung to the mattress for some seconds, measuring the distance to the pair standing in the middle of the room. Weak from emotion that almost overwhelmed him, he felt his limbs would not support him, and, gathering his cotton nightgown about him, he sank on his knees and crawled noiselessly forward. Between father and mother he crouched, then laid his head against the feet of the priest and feebly raised his arms.

"My father——"

The sight, and all it implied as judgment of evidence in defence, drove her to jealous frenzy, and she sprang forward as a panther leaps to succor her young.

"Don't touch him! Don't you dare to lay your finger on him! You have no more right to him than to an archangel! He has no father, has only his downtrodden girl-mother. Don't you dare to put your sacrilegious hand on his holy head. He is not yours!"

With his right arm he held her back, as she stooped to snatch the boy away, and, kneeling, he passed his left hand under the prostrate form, gathered him close to his breast, and looked up smiling into her eyes.

"Not mine! If I am not his father—who is?"

"He is mine, solely mine; body and soul, he belongs only to me! Before he was born you turned us adrift in the world to perish, and now that for ten years I have worked day and night, fought for bread and shelter, carried him on my bosom, slept with him in my arms, you—who robbed me of everything, even my good name—you dare—dare claim my outcast baby! I would rather shroud my darling than hear him call you father."

Leighton's arms stole round the priest's neck, and his tangled yellow curls touched the dark head bent over him. Father Temple kissed the little quivering face, strained him to his heart, and the long-sealed fountain broke in tears that streamed upon the clinging child.

"My baby, my son, my own lost lamb, for whom I have searched and prayed—God knows how faithfully, how sorrowfully—all these long, dreadful years!"

As she stood above them, barred by that tense right arm, noting the tight clasp of the thin hands locked behind the father's head, an impotent rage made her long to scream out the agony that found no vent save in a rapid beating of one foot on the bare floor—much like the lashing tail of some furious furred creature, crouching to spring, yet warily hesitant.

Father Temple's outstretched hand caught a fold of her skirt, and with it a strand of floating hair.

"Nona, my wife—my own wife——"

She twitched her dress from his grasp and shook it.

"I am not your wife! Thank God, I am no man's wife! I am free as I was before you came—an ever-lasting blot between me and the sunshine. I kept my promise to you. I set my teeth and was silent under a fiery storm of slander and foul accusations that blistered my girlish cheek with shame, but I waited till the years you named had passed, and you had reached your majority, and plucked up courage to face your father, and had a legal right to ratify what the Church sanctioned through the chaplain. Then I told my only friend all the facts. I ceased to hope, because I had lost faith, but Mr. Dane pleaded for you: 'Wait one year more, give him the last chance to do right.' He wrote to a friend in the old regiment and inquired about all the officers, and his answer told us that your father was in Europe, and that the major thought you were with him. Then I laid my case before one of the human vultures that batten on the wreckage of broken vows—a lawyer, expert in snapping matrimonial chains. He sent you all the necessary notices—sent them to your college address, the only one I could give him. Very soon the decree of absolute divorce was rendered, and I dropped all right to a name I had never publicly claimed—cast it off as gladly as I would some foul garment worn by a leper. Free—free to live my life as I pleased; Mrs. Dane and her boy Leighton—free to go wherever I wished, after death took the only real protector I ever had. And I chose, for my baby's sake as well as my own, to lead the hard life of a working woman, but clean, and honorable, and innocent as that of any abbess safely stored away from temptation behind brick walls and iron gates, and though my own little one may well be ashamed of his father, he will never need to blush for his mother when the peace of death hides her from an unjust and a cruel world."

Sunshine had vanished, the room was darkening, and the last glow from a topaz band low in the west flickered over the woman's head, as she swayed in the wave of passionate protest that rocked her from all trammels of control. There was a brief silence, broken by a strangling sob and cough, and over the breast of the priest's cassock a warm red stream trickled. He rose quickly with the boy in his arms and carried him to the window.

"Nona, a hemorrhage!"

"Lay him down. If you have killed him, it is the fit ending of all my wrongs at your hands. Now stand back! Back! Do you hear—you curse of my life!"

She sponged the child's face, laid a wet compress on his throat, and kept one finger on his pulse, not daring to give medicine while the narrowing red stream oozed more slowly. She lighted a lamp, flew into a recess near the stove, and came back with a hypodermic syringe.

"Now, mother's man, don't flinch."

Pushing up the sleeve, she injected a colorless fluid into his arm, held it some seconds, and laid her lips near the puncture. Then with one hand she held his head raised slightly, and with the other sponged the lips until the flow ceased and the gasping breath grew easy.

"Swallow your medicine slowly, don't strangle. You must lie perfectly still. Mother's own little man needs to go to sleep now and forget all he has heard to-day."

Father Temple had fallen on his knees at the opposite side of the cot, clinging to one of the boy's hands, and suddenly the child turned his head and looked imploringly, first at father, then at mother. Both understood the mute prayer in the beautiful, tender eyes. A quavering sound—part sob, part cough—made their hearts leap.

"I never will be fatherless any more. So glad! Don't leave me, father."

"Leighton, you shall always be fatherless. This man can be nothing to us. Because of his deceitful promises I suffered the disgrace of smarting from a horse-whip laid on my shoulders when one night I was driven out of my father's cabin by his wife, and to shelter myself from sleet and rain crawled into a covered wagon and slept on hay and corn, until Uncle Dane found me there, and had mercy on me. I owe to this priest every sorrow and trouble that have darkened my life and yours. All these years we have had only each other, and you must understand your mother is the one who has the sole right to your love. My darling, you and mother can be happy together, and we need only each other."

She struggled for composure, but there was an ominous pant in her veiled voice.

"I want my father! Oh, I want him—I—want him!" Tears glided over his cheeks.

She leaned down, snatched Leighton's hand from the priest's clasp, clutching it between both of hers, and turned her blazing eyes upon the kneeling man.

"Will you go now? Have you not done harm enough to satisfy even you? These are my rooms, and I will tolerate your intrusion no longer. Remember, my decree of divorce is absolute, and it secures to me the custody of my child."

"I recognize no validity in divorces, and the law cannot annul a ceremony performed outside of its restrictions and requirements. Because we were minors we invoked the aid of the Church, and our vows before God can never be cancelled by any civil statute. Except as a solemn, sacred rite, there was nothing in our marriage to legitimize our child. This is my son, not by license of law, but because we swore fidelity to each other 'until death do us part,' and called God to witness; and no human decree can rob me of my child—since you dare not name any other man his father. I defy you to lay your hand on his innocent head and question his legitimacy, which inheres only in a ceremony no civil law sanctioned. Months of tedious and well-nigh fatal illness delayed my return to you, and during my delirium your letters were mislaid. When at last I accidentally recovered two letters, and went on crutches to bring you back with me, you had disappeared. All the proofs of my search shall be laid before you, and though I do not wonder you grew desperate and cast me out of your heart as unscrupulous and treacherous, the facts when investigated must convince you I have kept my vows as faithfully as you kept yours. I felt that somewhere in the world my wife and child were adrift, through my folly, my cowardly fear of my father, and, broken-hearted and conscience-smitten, I confessed to the Superior of my Order in England at that time, that I desired to live a celibate in expiation of a rash act in my boyhood, which separated me from the wife I still loved. I took my vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity with the explicit understanding that they did not absolve me from my marriage vows, should God mercifully permit me to find my family. I hold supreme the oath I took under the stars at the Post, and second in sanctity my vows before the altar in our chapel. For the awful consequences of my boyish weakness I accuse only myself, and if it be part of my punishment that I have lost irrevocably the affection and confidence of the mother of my child, then, at least, there remains for me the comfort of finding my boy, from whom I will never again be separated; and to him I must atone for years of unintentional neglect."

He saw that his appeal was futile as the leap of a wave that breaks and sinks in froth at the foot of basaltic cliffs, and the joyful light died in his eyes when he began to realize that wishing to believe the worst she would never accept proofs offered in exculpation.

"Nona, try to forgive me, for the sake of our son, our own beautiful, innocent boy."

There was no answer but the steady, quick tapping of her foot on the floor, and her defiant face showed no more softening than an iron mask.

Leaning forward, he kissed Leighton's tearful cheek, and despite his effort to control his voice it trembled.

"My precious child, I thank God I have found you! Between your mother and me you must not attempt to judge now. She has suffered terribly on account of mistakes I made, and she certainly has the best right to you and to your love. It is painful for her to see me, and I cannot blame her, but some arrangement must and shall be made by which I can come often and be with you without intruding upon her. She will select and name the hours when my visits will give her least annoyance. Good night, my son. To-day I am happier than I have been since I kissed your dear mother good-bye."

He tore a blank page from Ugo Bassi's "Sermon," wrote a few lines, laid the paper near his wife's hand, and went out, closing the door very gently.

"The hemorrhage was not all blood. I think an abscess has broken, and it may save his life. He must have a change as soon as it is safe to move him; but at present it might be fatal. Your money and his in the Boston bank will make him comfortable, and unless you use it I shall be obliged to interfere. Let the doctor decide where and when the child should go. To-morrow at two o'clock I wish to come here, but you can easily avoid seeing me if you so desire. May God soften your heart towards your unfortunate but faithful husband."

When Father Temple entered the Herriott library, Noel rose from a desk where he was sealing letters and put out both hands.

"Herriott, most blessed of friends! How can I ever thank you?"

"You have found your wife and child? Thank God! I could scarcely wait for the good news I was sure you would bring me."

His eyes were misty, and the grip of his hands was harder than he knew as he drew the priest to a chair.

"Dear old fellow, it has been rather too much for you. Brace yourself with this mixture. I had an idea your Reverence might need a tonic, since 'after the manner of men, you have fought with beasts at Ephesus.' Drink it! Your spiritual superior would advise it if he could see your face."

"Tell me, Noel, how you discovered Nona."

"I saw her at the glove counter where she is employed, and was puzzled by her resemblance to a face I had admired in San Francisco. I heard out there that some mystery hung about her, but no hint of any impropriety on her part. Such delicacy of features and perfect coloring are rare, and faces so beautiful etch deep on one's memory. Belmont painted her as 'Aurora' in his group, and gave me a photograph of her head; but he spoke of her with respect, and commented on her proud prudishness in refusing to sit in his studio. You recollect Sidney Forsyth? He carried me to a 'night school' for working girls, established by his mother, and there I first saw 'Aurora,' hard at work in the bookkeeping class. He admired her extravagantly, and told me that despite her girlish appearance she was a widow with a child, and lived like a nun in the very small cottage of an old uncle. Last summer, in hunting through a discarded trunk hastily packed at Oxford while you were on the Continent, I found among several sheets from your portfolio that water-color sketch, and it revived my old suspicion that some early tragedy had driven you into cloisters. Sooner or later one finds on almost every man's road through life the sign-post, dux femina facti, and I stumbled against yours when I had ceased to conjecture your motive for a course that astounded your friends. Last night, after you left me, I verified a few dates in my diary, and to-day's visit to Brooklyn made it absolutely certain my identification was correct. I congratulate you, and am heartily glad that I helped to flush your family covey."

"Congratulations sound grim after all I passed through to-day. Did you ever dream you were dying from thirst, and just as you stooped to drink the spring vanished? I have realized that tantalizing vision. Nona will never forgive me, never accept my explanation, never believe my statements, never tolerate the sight of me. She hates me with an intensity that is sickening, and because the child is mine she would rather see him in his coffin than in my arms. She hugs to her heart the conviction that I am utterly vile, because she wants to believe the worst, and furiously rejects any attempt to prove that I am not a doubly dyed hypocrite and villain. You have been so loyal a friend, I should like to tell you all that occurred."

When he finished a detailed recital of his interview, he leaned back, sighed heavily, and closed his eyes.

"I knew you were going into a fiery furnace, for, from what I have heard and seen of your wife, I fear she is one of the few inexorable women, impervious to reason, to passionate pleading, to the most adroit cajolery. The hotter the lava, the harder when it cools. Will you permit me to offer a suggestion?"

The priest raised his haggard face and laid his hand on Mr. Herriott's knee.

"I shall be grateful for advice which I sorely need just now."

"You have found the missing, but if you are not wide awake and cautious you will lose them again, and permanently."

"What do you mean?"

"You told her you would go back to-morrow at two o'clock? I rather think you will not find her; she will have vanished forever."

"Impossible! The child is too ill to be moved, and she would not risk the danger to him."

"In her present mood nothing is impossible, and she would dare death if it were necessary, in order to thwart you. She belongs to more than one society of communists, and the freemasonry in operation is marvellous. There are places in this city, in Chicago, and in several New Jersey towns where she could disappear as successfully as in a Siberian mine; and you must keep in touch with your beautiful boy, who is much too fine a porcelain vase to be filled with the vitriol of socialism. Before you sleep to-night ask the police department to set a special watchman in sight of that house, with instructions to report to you any indications of intended removal."

"Then I must go, although I do not share your apprehension that Nona would rashly risk the boy's safety. Noel, I owe you so much—and for such various benefits—I am simply bankrupt in expressions of gratitude; but at least I can pray God to grant you your dearest desire in life, be that what it may."

He rose, and Mr. Herriott walked with him to the front door.

"Temple, write me fully all that you know I shall wish to hear. Let me help you in any way possible to secure a change of climate for your little St. John of the gilded locks. Early to-morrow I go home, and in a few days your cousins from Washington will be my guests. Are you quite willing Eglah should know the complications surrounding you at present?"

"Tell her everything, and do not spare me or suffer her to blame the innocent victims of my rashness. Some day Eglah may help me to soften my Nona's heart. When and where may I hope to see you again?"

"Very soon I start to Arizona for a short stay, thence to the most northern of the Aleutian Islands, where I expect to find Eskimo cliff-dwellers, and later to the region northwest of Hudson Bay. Be sure to write me, and Vernon—pardon my perhaps unjustifiable insistence—don't fail to secure police surveillance before you sleep."

When the door closed, Mr. Herriott wrote a telegram to the physician who attended Leighton, walked to the nearest telegraph office, and heard his message click over the wires.

A few days later he was not surprised to learn that only the sternly positive interdict of the doctor had frustrated an attempt to remove Leighton from Brooklyn at ten o'clock on Monday morning.