It took him days and nights to kill the cabinet. It was so stoutly built. When he was exhausted he crept to bed, not forgetting to lock the door on that scene of strange disorder. But at last it was done. The wall behind was bare and dirty, festooned with cobwebs. On the floor was dust and chips and splinters. The fire burned with the glowing heat of a sacrificial fire. Already he was calmer. Although he still belonged to Harrowsmith, although he had madly destroyed the one thing that might have redeemed him, although his days would now hold bitter moments, he was at peace. He watched it burn. He saw the wondrous handicraft of cunning dead men disappear line by line, and turn to ash. He was sitting so when his laundress came in at the widely flung door. It was the first time for days that she had been permitted to enter the sitting room. He nervously expected her to exclaim, to inquire. The blank wall was so obvious. The little room was hot like an oven, but she only flung her hands and cried out: “Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.” “What--_what_ about him?” “Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor. Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes. He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet. His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty. He dropped back in the chair. He laughed--laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know. A POLITICAL WOMAN. GULLY and his wife had one of the new sets just inside the gates. These sets are more expensive, more convenient, more respectable than the old ones. Lucinda--she was Gully’s wife--would never have consented to an old set. She set her face sternly against Bohemianism when it took a certain form. She didn’t object to it in the form of Liberty tea-gowns and discreet flirtations in the name of art and literature. Gully was a journalist. He found the Inn convenient, but Lucinda was always hoping plaintively that some day they would be able to afford a house in Bloomsbury, or, better still, a modest place in the country. She had six rooms, every convenience, and a most superior maidservant, the long streamers of whose cap, when she ran out to post a letter, lent a certain _cachet_ to the Inn.