arily.

"There must be some preposterous situations that don't come about."

* * * * *

And afterward he strolled across the lawn, where the locusts were
shrilling, as if in a stubborn prediction of something which was
inevitable, and he meditated upon a great number of things. There were a
host of fleecy little clouds in the sky. He looked up at them,
interrogatively.

And then he smiled and shook his head.

"Yet I don't know," said he; "for I am coming to the conclusion that the
world is run on an extremely humorous basis."

And oddly enough, it was at the same moment that Patricia--in
Lichfield--reached the same conclusion.

PART SEVEN - YOKED

"We are as time moulds us, lacking wherewithal
To shape out nobler fortunes or contend
Against all-patient Fates, who may not mend
The allotted pattern of things temporal
Or alter it a jot or e'er let fall
A single stitch thereof, until at last
The web and its drear weavers be overcast
And predetermined darkness swallow all.

"They have ordained for us a time to sing,
A time to love, a time wherein to tire
Of all spent songs and kisses; caroling
Such elegies as buried dreams require,
Love now departs, and leaves us shivering
Beside the embers of a burned-out fire."

PAUL VANDERHOFFEN. _Egeria Answers._

I

The doctor's waiting-room smelt strongly of antiseptics. That was
Patricia's predominating thought as she wandered aimlessly about the
apartment. She fingered its dusty furniture. She remembered afterward
the steel-engraving of Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet, with General Lee
explaining some evidently important matter to those attentive and
unhumanly stiff politicians; and she remembered, too, how in depicting
one statesman, who unavoidably sat with his back to the spectator, the
artist had exceeded anatomical possibilities in order to obtain a
recognizable full-faced portrait. Yet at the time this picture had not
roused her conscious attention.

She went presently to the long table austerely decorated with two rows
of magazines, each partly covered by its neighbor, just as shingles are
placed. The arrangement irritated her unreasonably. She wanted to
disarrange these dog-eared pamphlets, to throw them on the floor, to
destroy them. She wondered how many other miserable people had tried to
read these hateful books while they waited in this abominable room.

She started when the d