"Not for many years," she said, and for the first time her voice shook. "_Ah--h!_" His breath went inwards. Suddenly he began to fumble among the bed clothes. "The picture," he said incoherently, "your mother's picture. Pick it up," he ordered, his eyelids drooping strangely. "No--no--under the _bed_." Before I could stop her she had dropped to her knees and was fumbling among the rolls of dust under the bed. An overpowering dread had clutched at me, forcing the air from my lungs. But in that instant he had raised himself, by what must have been an almost incredible exercise of will, and grabbed her by the throat. "_Curse you!_" he cried, shaking her as one would a rat, "you and your mother--_cur_--" His hands dropped away, limp and brittle like withered leaves. He fell back.-- * * * * * Of course they will always find excuses for the dead, and eulogies. Even as I helped her into Jim's small curtained car and took my place at the wheel, I knew that the things that they would say about her would be more than I could bear. We plunged forward, and a moment later, rounding a curve, our headlights came full upon the outlines of the old farm with its hideous false facade. I could not resist glancing at her, though I said nothing. Her eyes were on her hands, held loosely in her lap. She did not look at me until, with another lurch, we had swung about again, and all but the road in front of us was drawn back swiftly into obscurity. I found that she had turned towards me then, and, as I laid one hand across her arm, I felt her relax to a relieved trembling. Before us the night crowded down over the countryside, masking its ugliness like a film, through which our lights cut a white fissure towards town. SHELBY[20] By CHARLES HANSON TOWNE (From _The Smart Set_) When I sit down to write of Shelby--Lucien Atterwood Shelby, the author, whose romantic books you must have read, or at least heard of--I find myself at some difficulty to know where to begin. I knew him so well at one time--so little at another; and men, like houses, change with the years. Today's tenant in some old mansion may not view the garden as you did long ago; and the friend of a man's later years may not hold the same opinions the acquaintance of an earlier period once formed. I think it best to begin with the time I met Shelby on the newspaper where we both, as cub reporters, worked. That was exactly twenty years ago. The boys didn't take to Shelby. He was too dapper, too good-looking, and he always carried a stick, as he called it; we were unregenerate enough to say cane. And, most loathsome of all, he had an English accent--though he was born in Illinois, we afterwards learned. You can imagine how this accent nettled us, for we were all unassuming lads--chaps, Shelby would have called us--and we detested "side."