l tiger was awake.

The play ran in spite of all and everything, and ran at the author's
cost It came to a sudden end in the middle of a week, when the author's
last cheque was returned with an official 'N. S.' marked upon it The
lately prosperous dramatist was ruined.

Thus the man and his memories are growing nearer and nearer to each
other, and very soon they must meet. There is yet but a year to traverse
before the Dreamer and the Dream stand face to lace with actual Fact and
Time. It is a year of frustrated hope and barren effort, of surrenders
and shames. It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name
is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet
extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a
distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong's latest expression
of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take
as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any
sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume
was gathered out of the desert of the writer's soul. It served one
purpose, since it provided Madge with at least a staff of silver
with which to beat the wolf from the door. The wild beast bayed and
threatened, but it never actually crossed the threshold. The discredited
man kept himself alive by scraps of anonymous journalism, until a
half-chance suggestion of fortune bore him away to the United States as
a member of a theatrical company of no great merit, which clung together
through desperately failing fortunes for a month or two, and then,
dissolving, left him stranded.

He floated, a pseudonymous unit, acting, writing, lecturing. Somehow or
other the weekly two or three pounds reached Madge, and the wolf still
howled outside her door and found no entrance.

When the spiritual anatomy of a man is displaced and the gall-bladder
takes on the function of the heart, it is far from being well with him
at the moment, and in these days it was very far from being well with
Paul Armstrong. Yet the jaundiced fit served its turn, and even
whilst its anguish burned and nauseated, he began to ask one wholesome
question: 'For whose shortcoming, for whose wrong-doing, for whose
virtues turned vicious, and whose vices tuned to airs of virtue, do I
thus suffer?' The answer was at first confused and loud. Annette's
name was noisy in it Claudia's sounded there. So did Gertrude's. And
of course the po