'Life's Handicap,'" he answered, with a start; "but why and but
why have I--"

"What's it about? I never heard of it," she declared.

"You never heard of 'Life's Handicap'?" he shouted; "you never
heard--you never--you mean to say you never heard--but here, this won't
do. Sit right still, and I'll read you one of these yarns before
you're another minute older. Any one of them--open the book at random.
Here we are--'The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes'; and it's a
stem-winder, too."

And then for the first time in her life, there in that airy, golden
Chinese restaurant, in the city from which he hasted to flee, Travis
Bessemer fell under the charm of the little spectacled colonial, to
whose song we all must listen and to whose pipe we all must dance.

There was one "point" in the story of Jukes' strange ride that Condy
prided himself upon having discovered. So far as he knew, all critics
had overlooked it. It is where Jukes is describing the man-trap of the
City of the Dead who are alive, and mentions that the slope of the
inclosing sandhills was "about forty-five degrees." Jukes was a civil
engineer, and Condy held that it was a capital bit of realism on the
part of the author to have him speak of the pitch of the hills in just
such technical terms. At first he thought he would call Travis'
attention to this bit of cleverness; but as he read he abruptly changed
his mind. He would see if she would find it out for herself. It would
be a test of her quickness, he told himself; almost an unfair test,
because the point was extremely subtle and could easily be ignored by
the most experienced of fiction readers. He read steadily on, working
himself into a positive excitement as he approached the passage. He
came to it and read it through without any emphasis, almost slurring
over it in his eagerness to be perfectly fair. But as he began to read
the next paragraph, Travis, her little eyes sparkling with interest and
attention, exclaimed:

"Just as an engineer would describe it. Isn't that good!"

"Glory hallelujah!" cried Condy, slamming down the book joyfully.
"Travis, you are one in a thousand!"

"What--what is it?' she inquired blankly.

"Never mind, never mind; you're a wonder, that's all"--and he finished
the tale without further explanation. Then, while he smoked another
cigarette and she drank another cup of tea, he read to her "The Return
of Imri" and the "Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney." He found