d not come from the real John
Brown.

John Brown looked him up and down quickly, then fastened his eyes on
the ruddy cheeks of his old friend. "Do they call you Beauty now as they
used to?" he asked, rather insolently.

"No. They only say, 'There goes Charley Steele!'" The tongue again
touched the corners of the mouth, and the eyes wandered to the doorway
down the street, over which was written in French: "Jean Jolicoeur,
Licensed to sell wine, beer, and other spirituous and fermented
liquors."

Just then an archdeacon of the cathedral passed them, bowed gravely to
Charley, glanced at John Brown, turned colour slightly, and then with a
cold stare passed on too quickly for dignity.

"I'm thinking of Bunyan," said the aforetime friend of Charley Steele.
"I'll paraphrase him and say: 'There, but for beauty and a monocle,
walks John Brown.'"

Under the bitter sarcasm of the man, who, five years ago, had gone down
at last beneath his agnostic raillery, Charley's blue eye did not waver,
not a nerve stirred in his face, as he replied: "Who knows!"

"That was what you always said--who knows! That did for John Brown."

Charley seemed not to hear the remark. "What are you doing now?" he
asked, looking steadily at the face whence had gone all the warmth
of manhood, all that courage of life which keeps men young. The lean
parchment visage had the hunted look of the incorrigible failure, had
written on it self-indulgence, cunning, and uncertainty.

"Nothing much," John Brown replied.

"What last?"

"Floated an arsenic-mine on Lake Superior."

"Failed?"

"More or less. There are hopes yet. I've kept the wolf from the door."

"What are you going to do?"

"Don't know--nothing, perhaps; I've not the courage I had."

"I'd have thought you might find arsenic a good thing," said Charley,
holding out a silver cigarette-case, his eyes turning slowly from the
startled, gloomy face of the man before him, to the cool darkness beyond
the open doorway of that saloon on the other side of the street.

John Brown shivered--there was something so cold-blooded in the
suggestion that he might have found arsenic a good thing. The metallic
glare of Charley's eye-glass seemed to give an added cruelty to the
words. Charley's monocle was the token of what was behind his blue
eye-one ceaseless interrogation. It was that everlasting questioning,
the ceaseless who knows! which had in the end unsettled John Brown's
mind, and driven him at l