the world was even more--_riant_--it's a word which the French use, for which I can't hit on an exact translation. Do you know French?" She nodded. "Then you'll know what I mean--than it is now; for, to my thinking, there's nothing like the first sweetness of a summer morning. Then, again, there are persons whom one does not find it easy to associate with tragedy; God seems to have intended them to strut through life as unconscious comedians; and the unconscious comedian's the finest of all. Elsey's such a one. Have you, by any chance ever seen the man?" She was silent; he went on. "Although I daresay that the possession on which he most prides himself is his dignity, in reality he's the most undignified of men. Surely there's no tragedy where there's no dignity. Tragedy's austere; Elsey never could be that. Yet, last night, there was a tragedy at 'The Bolton Arms'; and it seems that Elsey played a leading part in it. And the strangest thing was that, as he told me all there was to tell, the inherent comicality of the man made him the most tragic figure imaginable. Here's the story as it was told to me by Elsey; with addenda by other hands." She had known, all along, that it was coming. With clenched fists, and tightly closed lips, she waited for him to tell her what she knew so much better than he did. In the tale as he had it, however, she found that there were variants which to her were strange. "Among the guests at 'The Bolton Arms' was a man named Emmett, of whom I know a thing or two. Last evening, after dinner, he was found in his chair, seated at the table, dead. Someone had killed him. It seems that his head had been smashed in with a champagne bottle, the broken fragments of which were found upon the floor. The irony of it!--because, of all the things in this world there were few which George Emmett loved better than champagne. They laid him on the table, at which he had just done himself so well; and, a doctor having certified that he was dead, they left him there, alone, in the room in which he had dined and died." She knew, although she did not look at him, that he had taken the pipe out of his mouth, to press the tobacco closer; and she felt his eyes upon her face. She wondered what was coming next. It proved to be hardly what she had expected. Nothing could have been more casual than his tone and manner. To her, the very indifference with which he spoke seemed to heighten the effect of what he said. "There was the dead man on the table in the room. Some time after they had left him there there came a crash from within the room which, according to my informant, shook the house. That might have been an exaggeration, about shaking the house; because 'The Bolton Arms' is a substantial, solidly built, old-time structure, which, I should say, is not easily shaken. At anyrate there came a noise from within that room which was so loud, and so curious, that all the people in the hotel seem to have heard it, and most of them went