eir fullest capacity, in a gaze
of only partially alcoholic wildness.

Entirely aware of this singular glare, but not in the least
disconcerted by it, the recipient proffered his easy farewells. "I
had no idea it was so late. Good afternoon. Mr. Vilas, I have been
delighted with your diagnosis. Lindley, I'm at your disposal when
you've looked over my data. My very warm thanks for your patience,
and--addio!"

Lindley looked after him as he strode quickly away across the
green lawn, turning, at the street, in the direction Cora had
taken; and the troubled Richard felt his heart sink with vague but
miserable apprehension. There was a gasp of desperation beside
him, and the sound of Ray Vilas's lips parting and closing with
little noises of pain.

"So he knows her," said the boy, his thin body shaking. "Look at
him, damn him! See his deep chest, that conqueror's walk, the
easy, confident, male pride of him: a true-born, natural rake--the
Toreador all over!"

His agitation passed suddenly; he broke into a loud laugh, and
flung a reckless hand to his companion's shoulder.

"You good old fool," he cried. "_You'll_ never play Don Jose!"

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hedrick Madison, like too many other people, had never thought
seriously about the moon; nor ever had he encouraged it to become
his familiar; and he underwent his first experience of its
incomparable betrayals one brilliant night during the last week of
that hot month. The preface to this romantic evening was
substantial and prosaic: four times during dinner was he copiously
replenished with hash, which occasioned so rich a surfeit within
him that, upon the conclusion of the meal, he found himself in no
condition to retort appropriately to a solicitous warning from
Cora to keep away from the cat. Indeed, it was half an hour later,
and he was sitting--to his own consciousness too heavily--upon the
back fence, when belated inspiration arrived. But there is no
sound where there is no ear to hear, and no repartee, alas! when
the wretch who said the first part has gone, so that Cora remained
unscathed as from his alley solitude Hedrick hurled in the teeth
of the rising moon these bitter words:

"Oh, no; _our_ cat only eats _soft_ meat!"

He renewed a morbid silence, and the moon, with its customary
deliberation, swung clear of a sweeping branch of the big elm in
the front yard and shone full upon him. Nothing warned the fated
youth not to sit there; no shadow of imm