from the bosom of the wife I loved and hurried away from the embraces of the children whose careers it would be my solicitude to watch over. Imagine the agony if I had been cruelly spared to my seventy-eighth year--the agony of a condemned criminal who does not know on what day he is to be execu--" [Illustration: "THE ENTHUSIASM OF YOUTH SICKLIED OVER WITH THE PRESCIENCE OF SENILE CYNICISM."] His voice failed suddenly. He had slightly raised himself on his pillow in his excitement, but now his head fell back, revealing the fatal white patches on the baby throat. I seized his hand quickly to feel his pulse. The little palm lay cold in mine. I started violently and sat up rigidly in my chair. The child was dead. Downton was sobbing at my side. As I was writing out the certificate, an odd thought came into my head. I scribbled what I thought an appropriate epitaph and showed it to Downton, but he glared at me furiously. I hastened home to bed. My epitaph ran: HERE LIES WILLIAM ("WILLY") STREETSIDE, WHO LED A DOUBLE LIFE, AND DIED IN BLAMELESS REPUTE, AT THE AVERAGE AGE OF 39 YEARS. "_And in their death they were not divided._" _Cheating the Gallows._ CHAPTER I. A CURIOUS COUPLE. They say that a union of opposites makes the happiest marriage, and perhaps it is on the same principle that men who chum together are always so oddly assorted. You shall find a man of letters sharing diggings with an auctioneer, and a medical student pigging with a stockbroker's clerk. Perhaps each thus escapes the temptation to talk "shop" in his hours of leisure, while he supplements his own experiences of life by his companion's. There could not be an odder couple than Tom Peters and Everard G. Roxdal--the contrast began with their names, and ran through the entire chapter. They had a bedroom and a sitting-room in common, but it would not be easy to find what else. To his landlady, worthy Mrs. Seacon, Tom Peters's profession was a little vague, but everybody knew that Roxdal was the manager of the City and Suburban Bank, and it puzzled her to think why a bank manager should live with such a seedy-looking person, who smoked clay pipes and sipped whisky-and-water all the evening when he was at home. For Roxdal was as spruce and erect as his fellow-lodger was round-shouldered and shabby; he never smoked, and he confined himself to a small glass of claret at dinner. [Illustration: TOM PETERS.] [Illustration: EVERARD G. ROXDAL.]