I opened Miss Minion's front door with my pass-key, and as I climbed to my room I seemed to emphasize with my feet the fact that I loved Gladys Todd and was in an ecstasy of happiness. I slammed my hat down on the bureau as I vowed again that I loved Gladys Todd. Then I drew back and stared at my pin-cushion. The usual corpulent letter was not leaning there; its place had been taken by an emaciated telegram. "Do not rent flat. Have written explanation." Such was the message to me that day. At that moment I loved Gladys Todd, and I did not have to stamp the floor to prove it. I was sure that I had lost her, and it was the sense of my loss that made my love well up from unfathomable depths to overwhelm me. I was angry. My pride was hurt. I counted over the years of my untiring devotion to her, and they seemed to sum up the best years of my life. That the telegram foreran a more explicit statement there could be no doubt. After all she had written about the flat, her instructions that the furniture which she had inherited from her aunt must fit in, that my table must be near her easel--after all these evidences of her thought--her command could mean only that our romance was at an end and our dreams dissipated into air. There was some other man, I thought--perhaps Boller of '89--and remembering him, his picturesque garb and ridiculous pose, my own vanity was deeply cut. Until late that night I sat smoking violently and turning over in my mind the problem and all its dreadful possibilities. In bed, Sleep, the friend of woe, was long coming with her kindly ministrations, and yet held me so long under her beneficent influence that when I awoke I found lying beside my bed, tossed there through a crack in the door, the corpulent letter addressed in the tall, angular hand.