WE cannot live to ourselves alone, nor die so. If a man or a dog crawl off to perish in a wilderness, immediately death sets in motion a great activity. On the ground ants muster, flies drum and pound; in the earth worms make haste upward. On the empty sky a speck appears, wings gather, buzzards are overhead. In the bushes eyes peer, paws are lifted and set down with caution; coyotes, hyenas arrive. A city of scavengery is founded and begins to flourish.

Persis had said, "This is the last of Persis." As if there were ever the last of anybody or anything.

Of Persis it was almost the beginning. People were to hear of her now who had never known of her existence. She who had never done anything ambitious or earnest in any large sense was to become the cause of world-wide debate. The newspapers she dreaded so much were to give her head-lines above panics, wars, and empires.

When Persis screamed at the horror and the shame of being knifed, and Roake appeared, and she told him that she was ill, he believed her. He dispersed the servants. They knew, as servants always know, that a quarrel had been raging; but family quarrels were the staple of their lives, and they suspected nothing unusual.

Persis had told Roake to call the nearest physician. The telephone is the confusion of distance; it mixes near and far hopelessly. So Roake called the family physician, Dr. Thill; caught him dressing for the opera. He promised to "be right over."

Then Roake went back to give Mrs. Enslee this word. He found the woeful spectacle of Persis no longer able to hide her wound, no longer thinking of appearances. Enslee was on his knees sobbing. Crofts, too good a servant to express his emotions noisily, had not fallen to the floor or sunk into a chair; he had turned a little aside and stood waiting the next command; only, rubbing his hands together a little harder than usual, while the tears poured across his eyelids.

Roake tiptoed to him and put his hand on his arm, and whispered, "Mr. Crofts."

Crofts put his finger to his quivering lips and, beckoning his underling aside, whispered to him: "No word of this to the rest of the house, mind you. We'd best carry Mrs. Enslee to her room. Then we must help the master to his."

They took Persis' chair by the arms dreadfully; but Crofts could not lift his share of the weight. It was necessary to call Chedsey, and to explain things a little to him and to pledge him to silence for the honor of the house. He sickened of his burden and nearly fainted in the little elevator as they crowded into it with their hideously beautiful freight.

Nichette had the bed ready, and Enslee's man was helping her. Also two other chambermaids had gathered to talk of the scream that had shot through the house. Nichette banished the men while she took what care she could of what remained of Persis—so different an office now from what it had always been to Nichette.

Crofts told Roake to see to things below, and Roake and Chedsey went down to the dining-room. Here there were tasks that were not pleasant. They stared at the ruined graces of the table, the spilled wine and the red-stained flowers, the glasses shattered and fallen, as if an orgy had preceded there. The cook was told that the rest of the dinner would not be served. The laundress was called from her supper to take away the red table-cloth and the napkin. The housekeeper must know that Roake and Chedsey were not to be charged with the breakage. The kitchen-maid was sent to scrub the marble, and on her knees she must follow the crimson trail to the door of the elevator, and wash that, too.

Before the doctor arrived a dozen people had been told that the mistress of the household had killed herself. It was easy to warn them that loyalty to the family imposed absolute silence. But what money or what threat or plea could ever bribe a loose tongue to keep a secret for somebody else?

Then Dr. Thill came in his motor. He left his huge fur coat on the hall floor, and, dashing up-stairs, flung off his evening coat and his white waistcoat, and rolled back his cuffs. He wrought upon the exquisite bare flesh of Persis and upon the stopped clock of her heart with all his science; yet he could not make her anything but a cadaver.

As he toiled he asked questions. Crofts and Nichette told him what they knew, or thought they knew. Willie was supported in and questioned. Remorse and fright made him pitiable. Still there remained a fox-like intelligence. He told the doctor what Persis had told Crofts, but he was so full of contradictions and confusion that Dr. Thill quickly suspected the truth. He was enraged and revolted. The cruelty of the murder was bad enough; but the wantonness of destroying so perfect a machine, as he found Persis to be, was more wicked in his eyes.

Still, he was a typical family doctor. People who were dead were outside his province. His clients were the living, and his business to keep them alive and well. He had foiled death-bed revenges, aborted scandals that threatened ruin to the young; risked his life and his liberty for his patients. His trade was fighting the ravages of sin and error; saving people, not destroying them. He felt no call to deliver an Enslee to the electric chair.

He put Willie to bed, jammed bromides into him, and forbade him to talk or to see any one. He telephoned Persis' father and Willie's mother to come at once. He told them as delicately as he could. It was like breaking a thunderbolt gently. Persis' father was stricken frantic. He could not believe that his beautiful, his wonderful girl was dead. He ran to her bedside, lifted her in his arms as if she were again his little child, called to her, wept horribly over her, imagined the truth, and vowed every revenge.

After the first tempests had worn him out he began to feel that it would not comfort her to add scandal to her fate. He loathed the very name of Enslee; but he had profited by it; he was still involved with it financially; it was his daughter's final name. He joined the conspiracy to bury the truth in Persis' grave. To say that she had killed herself was an appeal for mercy; to proclaim that her indignant husband had executed her for her crimes was a damning epitaph. He solaced himself with the thought that it would be her wish.

Mrs. Enslee was first and last Willie's mother. Her thought was of him; her heart was his advocate alone. She committed herself utterly to his defense.

Dr. Thill was ready to give a certificate that Persis had died of heart-failure. Even the story of suicide would attract the noisy attention of the journals. He left the matter in abeyance for the moment. The needful thing was a few hours of saving peace and silence. He would be glad even to postpone the news from the next morning's to the next evening's papers.

But little things thwart great schemes.

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