“Mother, trash!” said Miss McCracken indignantly. “She had a woman there she called ‘Aunty’, who was no more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one--but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for life.” “Who was she?” cried Merlin. “For God’s sake what was she--a witch?” “Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you couldn’t pick up a paper without finding her picture.” Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world, passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually they became the friends of his boyhood out there, urging him to come and play before the last dark came down. He was too old now even for memories. That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said: “Don’t sit there like a death’s-head. Say something.” “Let him sit quiet,” growled Arthur. “If you encourage him he’ll tell us a story we’ve heard a hundred times before.” Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o’clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool. “O Russet Witch!” But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth. _UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES_ THE LEES OF HAPPINESS If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly disappeared. When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces--here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims of life--no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility or hint of tragedy.