blaming
the Demon for the whole dreadful affair. Her child had been allowed to
associate with a grandmother who had gone radical at an age when most of
her sex simmer in a gentle fireside conservatism and die respectably.
But it was too late now. She could only be brave, brave!

And he was to be there at nine sharp, which was too early, but the
flapper could be sure only after he came that nothing had happened to
him, that he had neither failed in business, been poisoned by some
article of food not on her list, nor diverted by that possible Other One
who seemed always to lurk in the flapper's mental purlieus. She just
perfectly wanted him there an hour too early; all there was about it!

These events had beaten upon him with the unhurried but telling impact
of an ocean tide. Two facts were salient from the mass: whatever he had
done he had done because of Ram-tah; and he was going to Paris, where he
would see the actual tomb of that other outworn shell of his.

He thought he would not be able to sleep. He had the night in which to
pack that steamer trunk. Leisurely he doffed the faultless evening
garments--he was going to have a waistcoat pointed like the waster's,
with four of those little shiny buttons, and studs and cuff-links to
match--and donned a gayly flowered silk robe.

With extreme discomfort he surveyed the new steamer trunk. Merely
looking at a steamer trunk left him with acute premonitions of what the
voyage had in store for him. But the flapper was the flapper; and it was
the only way ever to see that tomb.

The packing began, the choice garments were one by one neatly folded. A
light tan overcoat hung in Ram-tah's closet, back of the case. Ram-tah
was dragged forth and for the moment lay prone. He was to be left in the
locked closet until a more suitable housing could be provided, and
Cassidy had been especially warned not to let the steam-heated apartment
take fire.

He found the coat and returned to the half-packed trunk in the bedroom
where he resumed his wonderful task, stopping at intervals for always
futile efforts at realization of this mad impossibility. It was all
Ram-tah. Nothing but that kingly manifestation of himself could have
brought him up to the thing. He dropped a choice new bit of haberdashery
into the trunk and went for another look at It prone on the floor in
that other room.

A long time he gazed down at the still face--his own still face, the
brow back of which he had once s