ith a kind of
repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. "She was
the one who drowned herself, wasn't she?"

Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
to their value," he said, meditatively.

Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
He was in no humor to be amused by the older man's talk, and a
recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.

"I believe I must take myself off," he said. "I'd forgotten an
engagement."

He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
and unbosom himself to Flamel.

The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
pressure on his arm.

"Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
don't often have the luck of seeing you here."

"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.

Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.

"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself
asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.

"Oh, so-do--depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
"Are you thinking of collecting?"

Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round."

"Selling?"

"Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--"

Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.

"A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not much up on such
things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.

"A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?"

"Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him--by one person,
you understand; a woman, in fact--"

"Oh, a woman," said Flamel, ne