ced smile from the girl's lips. "I--I wanted to--to talk to
you."

"Yes?" She seated herself and motioned him to a chair near her. He took
the seat, and then fell silent, his eyes out the window.

"I thought you said you--you wanted to talk, she reminded him nervously,
after a minute.

"I did." He turned with disconcerting abruptness. "Alice, I'm going to
tell you a story."

"I shall be glad to listen. People always like stories, don't they?"

"Do they?" The somber pain in Arkwright's eyes deepened. Alice Greggory
did not know it, but he was thinking of another story he had once told
in that same room. Billy was his listener then, while now--A little
precipitately he began to speak.

"When I was a very small boy I went to visit my uncle, who, in his young
days, had been quite a hunter. Before the fireplace in his library was a
huge tiger skin with a particularly lifelike head. The first time I saw
it I screamed, and ran and hid. I refused then even to go into the room
again. My cousins urged, scolded, pleaded, and laughed at me by turns,
but I was obdurate. I would not go where I could see the fearsome thing
again, even though it was, as they said, 'nothing but a dead old rug!'

"Finally, one day, my uncle took a hand in the matter. By sheer
will-power he forced me to go with him straight up to the dreaded
creature, and stand by its side. He laid one of my shrinking hands on
the beast's smooth head, and thrust the other one quite into the open
red mouth with its gleaming teeth.

"'You see,' he said, 'there's absolutely nothing to fear. He can't
possibly hurt you. Just as if you weren't bigger and finer and stronger
in every way than that dead thing on the floor!'

"Then, when he had got me to the point where of my own free will I would
walk up and touch the thing, he drew a lesson for me.

"'Now remember,' he charged me. 'Never run and hide again. Only cowards
do that. Walk straight up and face the thing. Ten to one you'll find
it's nothing but a dead skin masquerading as the real thing. Even if it
isn't if it's alive--face it. Find a weapon and fight it. Know that you
are going to conquer it and you'll conquer. Never run. Be a man. Men
don't run, my boy!'"

Arkwright paused, and drew a long breath. He did not look at the girl
in the opposite chair. If he had looked he would have seen a face
transfigured.

"Well," he resumed, "I never forgot that tiger skin, nor what it stood
for, after that day when Uncl