And here closes the episode--for episode it truly was, and no story, as must have been discovered by this time. A story, properly conceived and executed, must have a beginning and an end, and this lacks both; it even lacks a hero and heroine. Fiction would have demanded, and a conscientious storyteller would have supplied, a much more picturesque and appropriate final act. The diamonds should have been restored, and (let us hope) the bill paid; Muriel should have married J. B.; Bob should have married Mazie; the curtain should have gone down on the lovers embracing and everyone else shaking hands. I have not been a novel-reader all these years for nothing, and nobody need remind me how a romance should end; if this narrative finishes in open defiance of all the proprieties, I can only offer the mean apology that it is all, or nearly all, true. _Pars minima fui!_ Some of it I saw, some heard, some merely guessed, and alas, none of the beautiful things mentioned above came to pass! Looking back on it now, with the compliant wisdom of forty-odd, I am satisfied it is as well those marriages did not take place. Muriel would hardly have been a success transplanted; and the Pallinder connection would inevitably have proved disastrous to poor Bob. As for Huddesley, I cannot sincerely say I was ever sorry that that entertaining and original scoundrel escaped; in other and more gallant days, he and the Pallinders alike might have figured as a sort of pirates, differing in degree and methods perhaps, hardly at all in kind. There is humour in the spectacle of one of them preying on the other. And, for the soul of me, I cannot be angry with either. _Bon voyage_, oh ye adventurers! What shores have you not coasted, and what men essayed in all these twenty-five years! At least I did not suffer by you, and therefore, with a noble generosity, I wish you well! I fell in with J. B. the other day, after a long interval; and he had a good deal to tell me in the pleasant hour we spent of, "Don't you remember----" and "Whatever has become of----?" J. B. goes up and down the world, and knows many men and their cities these days; he is getting a little bald and massive, yet is still a notable figure, not greatly changed; and, "What do you think?" he said, "I've seen Huddesley, and he knew me at once! It was the year of the St. Louis Fair; that's the last time I was West, you know. I went from there to the town of Joliet, Illinois, where you know the Government runs an elegant home for ladies and gentlemen whose society and services the community doesn't need all the time.