ies that he was making at the rate of one every two months. He
judged calmly and dispassionately that they were "going to be pretty
good some day," and that it would never be necessary for him to live in
a city. He signed his stories with an assumed name because he was full
of dramatic instinct. He wanted to be able--just the minute he was
well--to say to Cynthia:

"Let us be married!" Then she was to say: "Of course, G. G.; but what
are we going to live on?" And G. G. was going to say: "Ever hear of
so-and-so?"

CYNTHIA: Goodness gracious! Sakes alive! Yes; I should think I had! And,
except for you, darlingest G. G., I think he's the very greatest man in
all the world!

G. G.: Goosey-Gander, know that he and I are one and the same
person--and that we've saved seventeen hundred dollars to get married
on!

(Tableau not to be seen by the audience.)

So far as keeping Cynthia and his father and mother in ignorance of the
fledgling wings he was beginning to flap, G. G. succeeded admirably; but
it might have been better to have told them all in the beginning.

Now G. G.'s seventeen hundred dollars was a huge myth. He was writing
short stories at the rate of six a year and he had picked out to do
business with one of the most dignified magazines in the world.
Dignified people do not squander money. The magazine in question paid G.
G. from sixty to seventy dollars apiece for his stories and was much too
dignified to inform him that plenty of other magazines--very frivolous
and not in the least dignified--would have been ashamed to pay so little
for anything but the poems, which all magazines use to fill up blank
spaces. So, even in his own ambitious and courageous mind, a "married
living" seemed a very long way off.

He refused to be discouraged, however. His health was too good for that.
The doctor pointed to him with pride as a patient who followed
instructions to the letter and was not going to die of the disease which
had brought him to Saranac. And they wrote to G. G's father--who was
finding life very expensive--that, if he could keep G. G. at Saranac, or
almost anywhere out of New York, for another year or two, they
guaranteed--as much as human doctors can--that G. G. would then be as
sound as a bell and fit to live anywhere.

This pronouncement was altogether too much of a good thing for Fate. As
G. G's father walked up-town from his office, Fate raised a dust in his
face which, in addition to the usual ingre