"There's the buried treasure; you mustn't neglect that! I'm greatly your debtor for all the interesting things you've told me. This has been the happiest evening I've spent since----" "Since you began taking everything so hard? Please quit looking on your life as a burden; try to get some fun out of it!" The door opened to the key she gave him and the light of the hall lamp fell upon her face and glinted her brown hair as she put out her hand. "Don't forget me in the rush of things! And particularly don't forget that note of instructions. I'm counting on that!" "Not really?" she exclaimed. "I was just in fun, you know." "If I don't get it before I leave tomorrow evening, I shall be terribly disappointed. I shall take it as a sign that you don't think me worth bothering about!" There was a pleading in his voice that held her for a moment; she surveyed him gravely, then answered lightly, "Oh, very well! You shall have it, sir!" II Archie didn't know that the note caused Isabel a great deal of trouble. It was one thing to promise to tell a man who was all but a stranger just how to alter his way of life with a view to a happier existence, but to sit before a sheet of white paper and compose a letter on the subject was a very different matter, as Isabel's waste-paper basket could have testified. Her first experiments had been very serious, with urgent recommendations of hard physical labor; but this proved unsatisfactory. Then she attacked it from an ethical angle and suggested social service as a means of destroying the selfishness which she honestly believed to be one of his troubles. She scribbled on a pad the titles of half a dozen hooks designed for weary and disconsolate souls, but they hardly touched his case and besides he had probably been deluged with just such literature. Moreover, she must write a note that would not require an answer; this she felt to be imperatively demanded by the circumstances. She thought Archibald Bennett a nice fellow and she was sorry for him, but no more and no less sorry than she would have been for any one else who failed to find the world a pleasant place to live in. Something a little cryptic, yet something that would discourage further confidences without wounding him--this would solve the problem--and she spent an hour turning over the pages of a book of quotations searching for some stirring epigrammatic utterance. The wise of all the ages seemed to have been strangely unmindful of the needs of neurasthenic young men, but finally she hit upon these lines and copied them in her best hand:-- He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all.