"I like you for the real gentleman you are, Jake," I answered, laying my hand on his brow. "You like me too, Rita,--don't you?" "You bet I do!" she replied, dropping back into the slang that Jake best understood. He was happy after that and smiled crookedly. But, in the early morning, a violent fit of convulsions, in all its contorting agonies, caught hold of him. His head at last dropped back on Rita's arm and Jake Meaghan was no more. I covered up his face with a sheet, and we closed the door, leaving the faithful Mike alone by the bedside. I led the little, sorrowing Rita down to her boat and kissed her as I sent her across the Bay, home. Then, with a leaden heart, I went back, to sit disconsolately in my own cottage, feeling as if I had lost a part of myself in losing my old, eccentric, simple-minded friend. I opened up the papers Jake had left in my care and, as I read his will, it made me feel how little I knew of him after all and what a strange way he had of working out his ideas to what he considered their logical conclusion. His will was a short document, and quite clear. He wished to be buried in Vancouver. All he possessed, he left to Rita 'because Rita was always a good girl.' If Rita married George Bremner, the ten thousand dollars lying in the bank was to become her own, under her immediate and full control; but, should she marry any other man, or should she remain unmarried for a period of three years from Jake's death, this money was to be invested for her in the form of an annuity, in a reliable insurance company whose name was mentioned. He left Mike, the dog, to the care of George Bremner. The more I thought over that will, the more I cogitated over what was really at the back of Jake's mind. Did he think, in some way, that there was an understanding between Rita and me? or, as probably was more likely, was it an unexpressed desire of his that Rita,--my little, mercurial pupil, Rita,--and I should marry and settle down somewhere at Golden Crescent? Alas! for old Jake. Who knows what was in that big, wayward heart of his? Mike kept faithful watch over Jake's body, until they came to take it away. He neither ate nor slept. He just lay on the floor, with his head resting on his front paws and his eyes riveted on the bed where Jake was. We had to throw a blanket over Mike and hold him down bodily before the undertakers could remove his dead master. All the way out to the steamer, we could hear Mike's dismal howling. Never did such cries come from any dog. They did not seem the howls of a brute, but the wailings of a human soul that was slowly being torn to shreds. My heart ached more for that poor creature than it did even for Jake. All afternoon, all through that first night and still in the early hours of the next morning, the dog sobbed and wailed as if its more-than-human heart were breaking.