WHY? I SAID I would tell you the story of Adeline. You remember that she saw Orion fling himself out of the window. Her story is in two parts. You will wonder how it is that I know both sides. It is because I met James Pray and got to know him very well soon after his wife died. He put Betty to boarding-school, let the cottage furnished, came back to London, and lived in the Inn until he married again. His second wife is an artist too--a very sensible, capable woman--with mediocre pictures on the line and accounts of her artistic At Homes in the leading fashion papers. She keeps Pray well in hand. He is a successful portrait painter--of the third-rate sort. They live in Kensington. I go to see them sometimes. When first he came to the Inn he used to talk to me incessantly of Adeline. Oddly enough, it was Murphy’s old set he took. He talked to me about Adeline. I used to listen--with my tongue in my cheek. Sometimes it really seemed a little uncanny, and I had half a mind to tell him everything, and so quiet him. But Adeline, poor dead girl, was always begging me not to. He was forever asking--why, why? I could have told him. The very room could have told him. We sat and smoked and drank and talked--at least he talked--in that paneled room which some former fool had grained to imitate maple. The ghosts of Murphy and of Adeline--a guilty pair--seemed to glide between us and stand shadowy in the clouds of tobacco as poor Pray asked--why? The very wood on the walls could have told him, the very oak, that black, discreet door which holds so much, was pregnant with an answer to that mournful query of his--why, why? He talked of Adeline. He painted a nervous, evanescent creature, full of moods and always plaintively tender. It was not the Adeline I remembered. She had been fine, full, and strong, with steady gray eyes and skin of ivory, all health and life and fun and witchery and wicked daring. Though I never saw so very much of her. She was a lady, you understand; Murphy usually sported his oak when she came. He only asked me once to dinner, and I thought her most charming. * * * * * “PRAY.--Adeline, wife of James Pray.” “If anything should happen, if I should die first,” she said--“and you needn’t frown, because one of us must be first--you’ll put that in the paper.” She spoke dreamily, staring in front of her at the driving rain and the dripping trees. “Rubbish!” Pray said briefly. “Of course. To announce one’s death, or birth, or marriage in the paper is to avow one’s self commonplace--to brand one’s self commonplace through all eternity, the eternity of the penny press.” She laughed and added wistfully: