n regarded as
a facetious individual. Now my life depended on attaining a supreme
flippancy of attitude on pain of sacrifice to rites for which I had no
reverence. When at sundown I reached the place where the portrait smiled
whimsically at me from its post of honor, I sat for a while looking into
the comprehending eyes and my thoughts took more cheerful color. Before
me lay a situation in which I was to pit my legacy of human development
against the brute odds of minds lighted only to the mistiness of dawn.

"Frances," I said, "you smile. Of course since you are fixed in print,
you can't do otherwise than smile. I wonder--" I broke off and became
suddenly and unaccountably serious. "I wonder if you would smile, were
you here with me in the flesh as well as merely in the spirit. I wonder
if you would."

Then with a feeling which was tremendously real, I added fervently and
aloud, "Thank God you are not here in the flesh--but I am grateful for
your smiling. Somehow I find it reassuring."

After a little reflection I summarized the entire situation to the lady
with whom I discussed my affairs.

"You see, my dear," I informed her, "to their untutored and man-eating
minds I present a dilemma. I am either a great immortal, whom it would
be most unwise to heckle--or I am very good eating, in which case it is
a pity to let me grow thinner."

"It shall be our care, dear lady," I added, "to maintain this status of
godship and to that end we must arrange a little program of simple
miracles from time to time. You see," I explained, "it won't be long
before they will be coming here and demanding what manner of deity I am,
and what is my immortal name. Do you know what I shall tell them?"

I paused and grinned into the smiling eyes and the lips that seemed
trembling on the verge of speech.

"I shall tell them," I assured her, "that in me they behold the great
god Four-flush."

If I concede to the cold logic of material reasoning that this
dependable companionship and love of a man for a portrait washed up by
the sea was merely the aberration of a brain unseated by solitude, I
must also believe that a series of totally incredible coincidences
subsequently befell me. But if it be that certain things are written in
the stars and certain passions are irrevocably decreed, my life is freed
of grotesqueness and becomes logical.

While I lived under the sword of the problematical to-morrow, suspended
by the hair of an uncertain t