you might say, for ever. The more you say, the more you pay.'

Paul was not greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing,
but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his
mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on
purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by
force of repetition. There was no reason under heaven why he should
have attended the insolent call of Mr. Wilder, and he had not even
been conscious of a kindly impulse towards the man. There was a sort of
providential finger laid upon his own sense here. Of course, he denied
the belief, but it was active with him none the less. It was so active
that he resigned all the preparations he had contemplated for his own
defence, and absented himself from London.

During his absence the case of Armstrong against Armstrong was heard in
the Divorce Court. A Boanerges of a Queen's Counsel was entrusted with
Annette's side of it. He made a speech, and that speech was reported in
a hundred journals. Had it been true, the unlucky Paul would have been a
comrade for the devil, but there was no defence, and it passed as true.
Paul read the speech, and came tearing back express to London in a
tumult of rage and resentment. He was a day behind the fair, and could
do nothing. The world seemed to ring of him, and he had abandoned all
means of redress. He was publicly shunned, and shunned for ever.

So fruitful may be the smallest accident of life that this chance
episode with the drunken Wilder and the foolish resolve to which it led
seemed to have darkened Paul's skies for good and all. He might have
beaten Boanerges on every point save one, and have come out of the fight
with but one wound in place of a hundred, and that very far from fatal
Now he felt stabbed to death, and seemed to bleed at every pore.

The manager who was under contract with him to produce the comedy the
first manuscript of which he had placed in Ralston's hands, called to
see him, and advised strongly against production--at all events, for the
present The suffering fool was furious, and would listen to no reason.

'I put three thousand pounds behind it,' he cried. 'I give you that as
a guarantee. The play is a good play, and the public will listen to it,
slander or no slander.'

Playgoers remember the first nightof 'Myra'--the yells, howls, whistles,
cat-calls which made the whole three acts a pantomime in dumb show. The
mora