he Vermouth carefully when I heard a sound. Some
man's voice groaned hoarsely: "False, oh, God!--false, and Love is a
lie and friendship but the byword of devils!"

I looked around quickly. Hollis lay across the table with his head
down upon his outstretched arms. And then he looked up at me and
laughed in his ordinary manner.

I knew him--he was poking fun at me about my theory. And it did seem
so unnatural, those swelling words during our quiet gossip, that I half
began to believe I had been mistaken--that my theory was wrong.

Hollis raised himself slowly from the table.

"You were right about that theatrical business, old man," he said,
quietly, as he tossed a note to me.

I read it.

Loris had run away with Tom Tolliver.

A LITTLE TALK ABOUT MOBS

"I see," remarked the tall gentleman in the frock coat and black slouch
hat, "that another street car motorman in your city has narrowly
excaped lynching at the hands of an infuriated mob by lighting a cigar
and walking a couple of blocks down the street."

"Do you think they would have lynched him?" asked the New Yorker, in
the next seat of the ferry station, who was also waiting for the boat.

"Not until after the election," said the tall man, cutting a corner off
his plug of tobacco. "I've been in your city long enough to know
something about your mobs. The motorman's mob is about the least
dangerous of them all, except the National Guard and the Dressmakers'
Convention.

"You see, when little Willie Goldstein is sent by his mother for pigs'
knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always
crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and
then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a
spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and
throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a
horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and
Willie is sitting, with part of his trousers torn away by the fender,
screaming for his lost nickel.

"In ten seconds the car is surrounded by 600 infuriated citizens,
crying, 'Lynch the motorman! Lynch the motorman!' at the top of their
voices. Some of them run to the nearest cigar store to get a rope; but
they find the last one has just been cut up and labelled. Hundreds of
the excited mob press close to the cowering motorman, whose hand is
observed to tremble perceptibly as he transfers a stick o