bled then, and he had had to gulp hard.

"Listen, John, for what I am saying is very important. You don't know
what I mean now, but sometime you will." The whisper had grown strained
and frayed, but it was still distinct. "I can't go to the Never-Never
Land. But you may sometime. If you ... if you do, and if you find
Wishing-House, remember that the men who lived in it ... before you and
me ... were gentlemen. Whatever else they were, they were always that.
Be ... like them, John ... will you?"

"Yes, father."

The old gentleman with the eye-glasses had come forward then, hastily.

"Good-night, father--"

He had wanted to kiss him, but a strange cool hush had settled on the
room and his father seemed all at once to have fallen asleep. And he had
gone out, so carefully, on tiptoe, wondering, and suddenly afraid.

CHAPTER IV

THE TURN OF THE PAGE

John Valiant stirred and laughed, a little self-consciously, for there
had been drops on his face.

Presently he took a check-book from his pocket and began to figure on
the stub, looking up with a wry smile. "To come down to brass tacks,"
he muttered, "when I've settled everything (thank heaven, I don't owe
my tailor!) there will be a little matter of twenty-eight hundred odd
dollars, a passe motor and my clothes between me and the bread-line!"

Everything else he had disposed of--everything but the four-footed
comrade there at his feet. At his look, the white bulldog sprang up
whining and made joyful pretense of devouring his master's immaculate
boot-laces. Valiant put his hand under the eager muzzle, lifted the
intelligent head to his knee and looked into the beseeching amber eyes.
"But I'd not sell you, old chap," he said softly; "not a single lick
of your friendly pink tongue; not for a beastly hundred thousand!"

He withdrew his caressing hand and looked again at the check-stub.
Twenty-eight hundred! He laughed bleakly. Why, he had spent more than
that a month ago on a ball at Sherry's! This morning he had been rich;
to-night he was poor! He had imagined this in the abstract, but now of
a sudden the fact seemed fraught with such a ghastly and nightmarish
ridiculousness as a man might feel who, going to bed with a full thatch
of hair, confronts the morning mirror to find himself as bald as a
porcelain mandarin.

What could he do? He could not remember a time when he had not had all
that he wanted. He had never borrowed from a friend or been dunned by a