to me and, with tears of joy,
I marked where a warm little hand had rested fondly on
the right shoulder, and knew that Fifty-Six was the
accepted lover of his sweetheart."

Ah-Yen paused and sat for some time silent; his pipe had
sputtered out and lay cold in the hollow of his hand;
his eye was fixed upon the wall where the light and
shadows shifted in the dull flickering of the candle. At
last he spoke again:

"I will not dwell upon the happy days that ensued--days
of gaudy summer neckties and white waistcoats, of spotless
shirts and lofty collars worn but a single day by the
fastidious lover. Our happiness seemed complete and I
asked no more from fate. Alas! it was not destined to
continue! When the bright days of summer were fading into
autumn, I was grieved to notice an occasional quarrel--only
four shirts instead of seven, or the reappearance of the
abandoned cuffs and shirt-fronts. Reconciliations followed,
with tears of penitence upon the shoulder of the white
waistcoat, and the seven shirts came back. But the quarrels
grew more frequent and there came at times stormy scenes
of passionate emotion that left a track of broken buttons
down the waistcoat. The shirts went slowly down to three,
then fell to two, and the collars of my unhappy friend
subsided to an inch and three-quarters. In vain I lavished
my utmost care upon Fifty-Six. It seemed to my tortured
mind that the gloss upon his shirts and collars would
have melted a heart of stone. Alas! my every effort at
reconciliation seemed to fail. An awful month passed;
the false fronts and detached cuffs were all back again;
the unhappy lover seemed to glory in their perfidy. At
last, one gloomy evening, I found on opening his bundle
that he had bought a stock of celluloids, and my heart
told me that she had abandoned him for ever. Of what my
poor friend suffered at this time, I can give you no
idea; suffice it to say that he passed from celluloid to
a blue flannel shirt and from blue to grey. The sight of
a red cotton handkerchief in his wash at length warned
me that his disappointed love had unhinged his mind, and
I feared the worst. Then came an agonizing interval of
three weeks during which he sent me nothing, and after
that came the last parcel that I ever received from him
an enormous bundle that seemed to contain all his effects.
In this, to my horror, I discovered one shirt the breast
of which was stained a deep crimson with his blood, and
pierced