It was already late afternoon and the gas street lamps of the Boul' Mich' were being lighted for Paris, or at least for Paris in summer, by a somewhat frigid looking allumeur, when Philip Custer came to the end of his letter. He hesitated for an instant, wrote "Your----," then crossed that out and substituted "Sincerely." No, decidedly the first ending, with its, as is, or, rather, as ordinarily is, the case in hymeneal epistles, somewhat possessive sense, would no longer suffice. "Yours truly"--perhaps; "sincerely"--better; but certainly not "Your husband." He was done, thank God, with presences. Philip sipped his absinthe and gazed for an instant through the Cafe window; a solitary fiacre rattled by; he picked up the result of his afternoon's labor, wearily. "Dear Mary," he read, "When I told you that my employers were sending me to Paris, I lied to you. It was, perhaps, the first direct lie that I ever told you; it was, I know now, the last. But a falsehood by word of mouth mattered really very little in comparison with the enormous lie that my life with you had become." Philip paused and smiled, somewhat bitterly, at that point in the letter. Mary, with her American woman's intuition, would undoubtedly surmise that he had run off with Mrs. Everett; there was a certain ironical humor in the fact that Mary's mistaken guess would be sadly indicative of her whole failure to understand what her husband was, to use a slang expression, "driving at." "I hope that you will believe me when I say that I came to Paris to paint. In the past four years the desire to do that has grown steadily until it has mastered me. You do not understand. I found no one in America who did. I think my mother might have, had she lived; certainly it is utterly incomprehensible to father." Philip stopped. Ay, there was the rub--General Custer, and all that he stood for. Philip glimpsed momentarily those early boyhood days with his father, spent mainly in army posts; the boy's cavalry uniform, in which he had ridden old Bess about the camp, waving his miniature sabre; the day he had been thrown to the ground by a strange horse which he had disobediently mounted, just as his father arrived on the scene. Philip had never forgotten his father's words that day. "Don't crawl, son,--don't whine. It was your fault this time and you deserved what you got. Lots of times it won't be your fault, but you'll have to take your licking anyway. But remember this, son--take your medicine like a man--always."