n the page, and all of us with the bowed head.
And all for what? She is dead, so! Is it not?"

"Well, for the life of me, Professor," I said, "I can't see anything
to laugh at in all that. Why, your expression makes it a harder
puzzle than before. But even if the burial service was comic, what
about poor Art and his trouble? Why his heart was simply breaking."

"Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins
had made her truly his bride?"

"Yes, and it was a sweet and comforting idea for him."

"Quite so. But there was a difficulty, friend John. If so that, then
what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by
Church's law, though no wits, all gone, even I, who am faithful
husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist."

"I don't see where the joke comes in there either!" I said, and I did
not feel particularly pleased with him for saying such things. He
laid his hand on my arm, and said,

"Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others
when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust.
If you could have looked into my heart then when I want to laugh, if
you could have done so when the laugh arrived, if you could do so now,
when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him, for he
go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time, maybe you would
perhaps pity me the most of all."

I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.

"Because I know!"

And now we are all scattered, and for many a long day loneliness will
sit over our roofs with brooding wings. Lucy lies in the tomb of her
kin, a lordly death house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming
London, where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill,
and where wild flowers grow of their own accord.

So I can finish this diary, and God only knows if I shall ever begin
another. If I do, or if I even open this again, it will be to deal
with different people and different themes, for here at the end, where
the romance of my life is told, ere I go back to take up the thread of
my life-work, I say sadly and without hope, "FINIS".

THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE, 25 SEPTEMBER A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY

The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised
with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel
to those of what was known to the writers of headlines as
"T