It was there, one dreary evening in late November, that Marston’s name was brought to my dim little apartment, with the request that, if possible, I receive him at once. I was about to sit down to a lonely dinner, and the prospect of his company delighted me. Then he came into the room. I had last seen him with his friend Esmè as they stood together waving me good-by, the rich, heavy summer sunshine all about them, though something more than a trick of golden light flooded their faces. They were both vitally alive in widely different ways; and yet they strangely seemed to be merely parts of each other. Esmè was an erratic dreamer and seer of visions, and lacked always, even in the unimportant aspects of living, any sense of the personal, the concrete; Marston, in curious contrast, was at all times practical, level-headed, full of the luster of life. The man who stood hesitatingly just inside my door was not Marston, but some stone-sculptured image of the gay, glad boy I had known. The cry I could not choke broke through his terrible immobility, and he spoke, the words sounding unreal, as though he had memorized them for a lesson and rehearsed their very intonation. “I had to come. I had to tell some one. Then I will go away. I don’t know where; just away. You knew him, knew I loved him. Will you let me tell you? Then I will go away.” It flashed across my mind in the second before I found words that I had half wondered why Esmè was not with him. It seemed impossible that even their bodies could be separated. I tried to lead him to the fire and remove his overcoat, but he pushed me from him. “No, no; don’t touch me. You don’t know, don’t understand. I’ve hunted two weeks trying to find some one—you, any one who knew us to whom I could tell it.” He hesitated, and I waited. His voice took on a curious quality of childlike appeal as he went on: “You know I loved him, know I’d given my life for his, don’t you?” Such phrasing was utterly unlike Marston, but I had seen their friendship in all the glory of its intensity, and I knew no sacrifice would have been too great. I assured him of this, and, remembering my nursing, insisted that he eat, promising to listen to anything he wanted to tell me. We sat facing each other across the spread table, but neither of us thought of the food after the first few mouthfuls. Twice in the early part of his story I filled his glass with claret, but I cannot recollect his drinking any. “You must think this strange of me, but I’m not really mad, not now. You see, I’ve lived with the horror ever since they gave me leave—just afterward, trying to find some one I could talk to, some one who would help me go on and finish the things we’d— “I want to make it all as clear as possible, but I’ve got to tell it my own way, and that isn’t clear.