"Well, the old wasp required fresh meat for its young, so, with her sting, she annihilated the nerve controlling motion, laid her egg, certain that her progeny would find perfectly fresh food when born. But if she had thrust that sting of hers a little higher—at the juncture of skull and thorax—death would have taken that spider like a stroke of lightning." He laughed: "So I say it’s better to get the stroke of Fate in the neck than to get it in any particular area and live for a while a paralyzed victim for some creature ultimately to eat alive." There was a silence. Helen broke it with pleasant decision: "This is _not_ an appetizing conversation. If anybody wishes any the tea is ready." There was enough daylight left in the studio so the lamps remained unlighted. "Do you suppose we ought to go out somewhere?" asked Stephanie, "and leave the place to those two poor things in there? You know they may be too unhappy or too embarrassed to come out and run the gauntlet." But Stephanie was wrong; for, as she ended, Belter appeared at the end of the studio in the fading light. His young wife came slowly forward beside him. The strain, the tension, the effort, all were visible, but the girl held herself erect and the man fairly so. There was tea for them—no easier way to mitigate their ordeal. Conversation became carelessly general; strawberries and little cakes were tasted; a cigarette or two lighted. Then, after a while there chanced to fall a silence; and the young wife knew that the moment belonged to her. "I think," she said in a distinct but still little voice, "that we ought to go home. If you are ready, Harry——" *CHAPTER XXVIII* By the end of the first week in June Cleland was in a highly excited state of mind in regard to his infant novel, in which all the principals were now on the edge of catastrophe. "I don’t know how they got there," he said nervously to Badger Spink, who had dropped in to suggest himself as illustrator in case any magazine took the story for serial publication. Spink’s clever, saturnine features remained noncommittal. If Cleland turned out to be a coming man, he wished to participate and benefit; if he proved a failure he desired to remain pleasantly aloof. For the only thing in the world that interested Badger Spink was his own success in life; and he had a horror of contaminating it by any professional association with mediocrity or failure. "What’s your story about?" he inquired with that bluntness that usually passed for the disinterested frankness of good comradeship. "Oh, it’s about a writer of stories," said Cleland, vaguely. "He’s the hero?" "If you’d call him that. What is a hero, Spink? I never saw one in real life." Spink squinted. It was his way of grinning.