hey're"--he lifted a cold hand and tried to point to a little
heap of trinkets lying on the drawers at the foot of the bed--"they're
for you. Take them, will you? Take them now."

Dan nodded. "I'll take 'em, thank you, old man," he said, and sobbed
suddenly. "Don't worry, Ted. Don't try to talk, dear old boy."

"I've got to. You know about Kitty. I was going to marry her next week.
I took her away from the shop--made her give up her living. She's
bought things to marry me. She can't pay for them. You--you----"

A struggle here, upon which Dan, in spite of himself, turned his back.

"I know," he said, brokenly. "I'll pay for them. I'll see to her. It'll
be all right, Ted."

"No! My mother," the dying boy said; "tell her. She won't be pleased.
Ask her to give Kitty a hundred pounds from me--with my love.
Promise--promise."

"I promise," Dan said. "Anything--anything, dear old man. I know what
you'll want done--don't, for God's sake, talk any more."

But for another hour of misery, of battling for breath, hideous to
suffer and heart-breaking to witness, he would attempt to talk,
irrationally at times, but now and again with a startling coherence.
His mind ran on that gift of a hundred pounds. He sent message after
message to the little shop-girl for whom, with the senseless
prodigality of such youth, he had proposed to fling away his future.
Again and again he adjured his friend to tell his mother what a good
little girl Kitty was, how she had stuck to him and been a brick.

They said he was a clever fellow in his profession, the long-haired,
long-legged young doctor, with his harum-scarum ways and his ready
laugh. He had made a true diagnosis of his own case. Before doctors and
nurses could be got to him he was dead.

"Don't look at me," was the last he said. "Pull the sheet over my
face--don't look."

And so, with the thoughtfulness for others which had proclaimed him
Gentleman in that inferior society where it had pleased him to move, he
hid his suffering from the man who sat weeping like a woman beside him,
and died.

* * * * *

It was Dan, his face blurred and swollen by crying, his usually
darkened and subdued red hair proclaiming its curly nature in all the
fierceness of its roseate hue--Dan, who at that moment would rather
have been in any other place on earth--who received the bereaved
mother, led her to the door of the death-chamber, and retired in
miserable