the desk, and Edna took down the receiver.

"Charley Welsh is sick," she began, when the connection had been made.
"What? No I'm not Charley Welsh. Charley Welsh is sick, and his sister
wants to know if she can come out this afternoon and draw his pay for
him?"

"Tell Charley Welsh's sister that Charley Welsh was out this morning,
and drew his own pay," came back the manager's familiar tones, crisp
with asperity.

"All right," Edna went on. "And now Nan Bellayne wants to know if she
and her sister can come out this afternoon and draw Nan Bellayne's pay?"

"What'd he say? What'd he say?" Max Irwin cried excitedly, as she hung
up.

"That Nan Bellayne was too much for him, and that she and her sister
could come out and get her pay and the freedom of the Loops, to boot."

"One thing, more," he interrupted her thanks at the door, as on her
previous visit. "Now that you've shown the stuff you're made of, I
should esteem it, ahem, a privilege to give you a line myself to the
Intelligencer people."

THE MINIONS OF MIDAS

Wade Atsheler is dead--dead by his own hand. To say that this was
entirely unexpected by the small coterie which knew him, would be to say
an untruth; and yet never once had we, his intimates, ever canvassed
the idea. Rather had we been prepared for it in some incomprehensible
subconscious way. Before the perpetration of the deed, its possibility
is remotest from our thoughts; but when we did know that he was dead, it
seemed, somehow, that we had understood and looked forward to it all the
time. This, by retrospective analysis, we could easily explain by the
fact of his great trouble. I use "great trouble" advisedly. Young,
handsome, with an assured position as the right-hand man of Eben Hale,
the great street-railway magnate, there could be no reason for him to
complain of fortune's favors. Yet we had watched his smooth brow furrow
and corrugate as under some carking care or devouring sorrow. We had
watched his thick, black hair thin and silver as green grain under
brazen skies and parching drought. Who can forget, in the midst of the
hilarious scenes he toward the last sought with greater and greater
avidity--who can forget, I say, the deep abstractions and black moods
into which he fell? At such times, when the fun rippled and soared from
height to height, suddenly, without rhyme or reason, his eyes would turn
lacklustre, his brows knit, as with clenched hands and face overshot
with spasms