gain.

'What is happening?' it read. 'Shall I come over?'

I sucked a pencil for a while, and then I wrote the reply.

It was not an easy cable to word, but I managed it.

'No,' I wrote, 'stay where you are. Profession overcrowded.'

WILTON'S HOLIDAY

When Jack Wilton first came to Marois Bay, none of us dreamed that he
was a man with a hidden sorrow in his life. There was something about
the man which made the idea absurd, or would have made it absurd if he
himself had not been the authority for the story. He looked so
thoroughly pleased with life and with himself. He was one of those men
whom you instinctively label in your mind as 'strong'. He was so
healthy, so fit, and had such a confident, yet sympathetic, look about
him that you felt directly you saw him that here was the one person you
would have selected as the recipient of that hard-luck story of yours.
You felt that his kindly strength would have been something to lean on.

As a matter of fact, it was by trying to lean on it that Spencer Clay
got hold of the facts of the case; and when young Clay got hold of
anything, Marois Bay at large had it hot and fresh a few hours later;
for Spencer was one of those slack-jawed youths who are
constitutionally incapable of preserving a secret.

Within two hours, then, of Clay's chat with Wilton, everyone in the
place knew that, jolly and hearty as the new-comer might seem, there
was that gnawing at his heart which made his outward cheeriness simply
heroic.

Clay, it seems, who is the worst specimen of self-pitier, had gone to
Wilton, in whom, as a new-comer, he naturally saw a fine fresh
repository for his tales of woe, and had opened with a long yarn of
some misfortune or other. I forget which it was; it might have been any
one of a dozen or so which he had constantly in stock, and it is
immaterial which it was. The point is that, having heard him out very
politely and patiently, Wilton came back at him with a story which
silenced even Clay. Spencer was equal to most things, but even he could
not go on whining about how he had foozled his putting and been snubbed
at the bridge-table, or whatever it was that he was pitying himself
about just then, when a man was telling him the story of a wrecked
life.

'He told me not to let it go any further,' said Clay to everyone he
met, 'but of course it doesn't matter telling you. It is a thing he
doesn't like to have known. He told me because he said there was