Later Felix Kennaston was destined to puzzle over his inability to recollect what motive prompted him to slip this glittering trifle into his pocket. A trifle was all that it seemed then. He always remembered quite clearly how it sparkled in the abating glare of that day’s portentous sunset; and how the tree-trunks westward showed like the black bars of a grate, as he walked slowly through the gardens of Alcluid. Alcluid, be it explained, was the queer name with which Felix Kennaston’s progenitors had seen fit to christen their fine country home near Lichfield. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ II Beyond Use and Wont Fares the Road to Storisende KENNASTON was to recall, also, that on this evening he dined alone with his wife, sharing a taciturn meal. He and Kathleen talked of very little, now, save the existent day’s small happenings, such as having seen So-and-so, and of So-and-so’s having said this-or-that, as Kennaston reflected in the solitude of the library. But soon he was contentedly laboring upon the book he had always intended to write some day. Off and on, in common with most high-school graduates, Felix Kennaston had been an “intending contributor” to various magazines, spasmodically bartering his postage-stamps for courteously-worded rejection-slips. Then, too, in the old days before his marriage, when Kennaston had come so near to capturing Margaret Hugonin and her big fortune, the heiress had paid for the printing of _The King’s Quest_ and its companion enterprises in rhyme, as well as the prose _Defence of Ignorance_—wide-margined specimens of the far-fetched decadence then in vogue, and the idol of Kennaston’s youth, when he had seriously essayed the parlor-tricks of “stylists.” And it was once a familiar story how Marian Winwood got revenge on Felix Kennaston, when he married Kathleen Saumarez, by publishing, in a transparent guise of fiction, all the love-letters he had written Miss Winwood; so that Kennaston might also have claimed to be generally recognized as the actual author of her _Epistles of Ananias_, which years ago created some literary stir. * * * * *