bearing the imprints of
hobnails--Cutty constructed the scene. A wave of bitter rage rolled over
him. The beast! Karlov had done this thing, with poor old Gregor looking
on, too weak to intervene. Not so many years ago these bits of wood,
under the master's touch, had entranced the souls of thousands. Cutty
recalled a fairy tale he had read when a boy about a prince whose soul
had been transformed into a flower which, if plucked or broken, died.
Karlov had murdered Stefani Gregor, perhaps not legally but actually
nevertheless.

Rehabilitated in soul, Cutty left the room. He had read a compelling
lesson in self-sacrifice. He was going to pick up his cross and go on
with it, smiling. After all, Kitty was only an interlude; the big thing
was the game; and shortly he would be in the thick of great events
again. But Kitty should be happy.

His old analytical philosophy resumed its functions. The contempt and
jealousy of one race for another; what was God's idea in implanting that
in souls? Hawksley was at base Russian. The boy's English education,
his adopted outlook upon life, made it possible for Cutty to ignore the
racial antagonism of the Anglo-Saxon for all other races. Stefani Gregor
at one end of the world and he at the other, blindly working out the
destinies of Kitty Conover and Ivan Mikhail Feodorovich and so forth and
so on, with the blood of Catharine in his veins! Made a chap dizzy to
think of it. Traditions were piling up along with crowns and sceptres in
the abyss.

When he returned to the attic he felt himself fortified against any
inevitability. Hawksley was sitting up, his back to the wall, staring
groggily but with reckless adoration into Kitty's lovely face. Youth
will be served. As if, watching these two, there could be any doubt of
it! And he had bent part of his energies toward keeping them separated.

"Ha!" he cried, cheerfully. "Back on top again, I see. How's the head?"

"Haven't any; no legs; I'm nothing at all but a bit of my own
imagination. How do you feel?"

"Like the aftermath of an Irish wake." Then Cutty's battered face
assumed an expression that was meant to typify gravity. "John," he aid,
"I've bad news for you."

John. A glow went over the young man's aching body. John. What could
that signify except that he had passed into the eternal friendship of
this old thoroughbred? John.

"About Stefani?"

"Stefani is dead. He died speaking your mother's name."

Hawksley's head sank; h