"One can never tell.... And in case you and Steve have to plod along without me some day, before either of you are really wise enough to dispense with my invaluable advice, try to understand her, Jim. Try always; try patiently.... Because I made myself responsible.... And, for all her honesty and sweetness and her obedience, Jim, there is—perhaps—restless blood in Steve.... There may even be the creative instinct in her also.... She’s very young to develop it yet—to show whether it really is there and amounts to anything.... I should like to live long enough to see—to guide her for the next few years——" "Of course you are going to live to see Steve’s kiddies!" cried the young fellow in cordially scornful protest. "You know perfectly well, Father, that you don’t look your age!" "Don’t I?" said Cleland Senior, with a faint smile. "And you feel all right, don’t you, Father?" insisted the boy in that rather loud, careless voice which often chokes tenderness between men. For the memory that these two shared in common made them doubly sensitive to the lightest hint that everything was not entirely right with either. "Do you feel perfectly well?" repeated the son, looking at his father with smiling intentness. "Perfectly," replied Cleland Senior, lying. He had another chat with Dr. Wilmer the following afternoon. It had been an odd affair, and both physician and patient seemed to prefer to speculate about it rather than to come to any conclusion. It was this. A week or two previous, lying awake in bed after retiring for the night, Cleland seemed to lose consciousness for an interval—probably a very brief interval; and revived, presently, to find himself upright on the floor beside his bed, holding to one of the carved posts, and unable to articulate. He made no effort to arouse anybody; after a while—but how long he seemed unable to remember clearly—he returned to bed and fell into a heavy sleep. And in the morning when he awoke, the power of speech had returned to him. But he felt irritable, depressed and tired. That was his story. And the question he had asked Dr. Wilmer was a simple one. But the physician either could not or would not be definite in his answer. His reply was in the nature of a grave surmise. But the treatment ordered struck Cleland as ominously significant. *CHAPTER X* To any young man his first flirtation with Literature is a heart-rending affair, although the jade takes it lightly enough. But that muse is a frivolous youngster and plagues her young lovers to the verge of distraction. And no matter how serious a new aspirant may be or how determined to remain free from self-consciousness, refrain from traditional mental attitudes and censor every impulse toward "fine writing," his frivolous muse beguiles him and flatters him, and leads him on until he has succumbed to every deadly scribbler’s sin in his riotous progress of a literary rake.