e, address or signature was
written the line:

"Mr. Galbraith is better--and he is grateful."

XL

APPLES OF ISTAKHAR

The swinging arc-light suspended above the street-crossing sputtered and
died down to a dull red dot of incandescence as Griswold returned
Margery's note to his pocket and walked on.

There are crises in which the chief contention looms so large as to
leave no room for the ordinary mental processes. Griswold saw no
significance in the broken line of Margery's message. The one tremendous
revelation--the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally
fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her--was
blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the
struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment
was bitter.

He was two squares beyond the crossing of the broken-circuited
arc-light, and was still following the curve of the lakeside boulevard,
when he came to the surface of the submerging wave long enough to
realize that he had entered Jasper Grierson's portion of the water-front
drive. The great house, dark as to its westward gables save for the
lighted upper windows marking the sick-room and its antechamber, loomed
in massive solidity among its sheltering oaks; and the moon, which had
now topped the hills and the crimsoning smoke haze, was bathing
land- and lake-scape in a flood of silver light, whitening the pale yellow
sands of the beach and etching fantastic leaf-traceries on the gravel of
the boulevarded driveway.

There was no enclosing fence on the Mereside border of the boulevard,
and under the nearest of the lawn oaks there were rustic park seats,
Jasper Grierson's single concession to the public when he had fought for
and secured his property right-of-way through to the lake's margin.
Griswold turned aside and sat down on one of the benches. The
disappointment was growing less keen. He was beginning to understand
that he had made no allowance for the eternal feminine in the idealized
_Fidelia_--for the feminine and the straitly human. But the
disheartenment remained. Should he stay and fight it out? Or should he
take pity upon the poor prisoner of the conventions and seek to postpone
the day of reckoning by flight?

He had not fitted the answer to either of these sharp-pointed queries
when a pair of light-fingered hands came from behind to clap themselves
upon his eyes, and a well-known voice said, "Guess."

"M