would never forgive me."

"If she found it out."

"She's the kind who would. What do you think of her, Miss Frances?"

"I think she is wonderful. Frankly, I should tell her everything--if
there is anything more to be told."

When dinner was over, the nurse gone back to the patient and Captain
Harrison to his club, Cutty lit his odoriferous pipe and patrolled the
windows of his study. Ever since Kitty's departure he had been mulling
over in his mind a plan regarding her future--to add a codicil to his
will, leaving her five thousand a year, so Molly's girl might always
have a dainty frame for her unusual beauty. The pity of it was that
convention denied him the pleasure of settling the income upon her at
once, while she was young. He might outlive her; you never could tell.
Anyhow, he would see to the codicil. An accident might step in.

He got out his chrysoprase. In one corner of the room there was a large
portfolio such as artists use for their proofs and sketches; and from
this he took a dozen twelve-by-fourteen-inch photographs of beautiful
women, most of them stage beauties of bygone years. The one on top
happened to be Patti. The adorable Patti!... Linda, Violetta, Lucia.
Lord, what a nightingale she had been! He laughed laid the photograph
on the desk, and dipped his hand into a canvas bag filled with polished
green stones which would have great commercial value if people knew more
about them; for nothing else in the world is quite so beautifully green.

He built tiaras above the lovely head and laid necklaces across the
marvellous throat. Suddenly a phenomenon took place. The roguish eyes of
the prima donna receded and vanished and slate-blue ones replaced them.
The odd part of it was, he could not dissipate the fancied eyes for the
replacement of the actual. Patti, with slate-blue eyes! He discarded
the photograph and selected another. He began the game anew and was
just beginning the attack on the problem uppermost in his mind when the
phenomenon occurred again. Kitty's eyes! What infernal nonsense! Kitty
had served merely to enliven his tender recollections of her
mother. Twenty-four and fifty-two. And yet, hadn't he just read that
Maeterlinck, fifty-six, had married Mademoiselle Dahon, many years
younger?

In a kind of resentful fury he pushed back his chair and fell to pacing,
eddies and loops and spirals of smoke whirling and sweeping behind him.
The only light was centred upon the desk, so he might