And there was some truth in it. I do not think that, except at the very last, he was ever able to forget that Mrs. FolyatRaikes was a daughter of Lord Braintree.

But he had his moments of terrible lucidity. What was the matter with him, he would say, was simply his damned celebrity. He could n't get rid of it. If only, he moaned, he could curl up and creep back into obscurity again. But he could n't. It was, he said, as if a rose should shut and be a bud again.

And so the rose went on expanding till it began to fade, and its leaves fell one by one on Mrs. Folyat-Raikes's drawing-room floor.

His publishers saw nothing wrong with the novel he brought out in his third year. It sold all right; but he was thoroughly frightened. As if it had been the first symptom of a retributive malady, that novel sobered him. You see, he was not a snob at bottom, only at the top. At bottom he was a very serious artist, and he had realized his appalling danger.

It

And then the great fight began. lasted two years, and was made hideous by an element of personal virulence on both sides, secret, but profound. Secret, Secret, that is, at first. At first Mrs. FolyatRaikes was merely unscrupulous, and Watt Gunn merely evasive. He lied, but with no hope of really deceiving her. He He would refuse three invitations running on

the plea that he was out of town. He was n't, and she knew it, and he knew that she knew it, and that she would forgive him anything. Then because he was a kind little chap at heart and hated to hurt people, he would dine with her twice running to make up. And their mutual fear and hostility would smolder. Then her clutches would tighten, and he would break loose again madly. His excuses became disgraceful, preposterous, fantastic. A child could have seen through them.

So I was n't in the least surprised when he came to me one day and told me that he 'd got appendicitis. He was going into a nursing home, he said, on the fourteenth.

"You mean," I said, "that Mrs. Raikes has a dinner-party on the fifteenth to which you are invited."

He said he meant that he was going. He said it in that rather hoarse, rather squeaky voice of his that carried conviction. There was about him a morbid exaltation and excitement. I was to tell everybody that he was going.

And he went. I called to see him three days after. His nursing home-I 'm not going to tell you exactly where it was, but it was in a beautiful green square, with lots of trees in it. I found him established in a lofty room on the first floor. He was sitting up in bed by the window, flushed and bright-eyed, looking at the trees, simply looking at them.

I could n't at first detach him from his contemplation of the square garden. He said he liked it; it was "so jolly bosky." "And, oh, Simpson, the peace, the blessed peace of it!" He had his fountain-pen and writing-pad in bed with him, but he had n't written a line. He said he was too happy.

He

I inquired about his appendicitis. shook his head gravely, and said that an operation was not considered necessary at present; but that he would have to stay in the nursing home for five or six weeks to make sure.

"Five or six weeks, Simpson; longer, perhaps. In fact, I don't know when I shall be out."

I told him he 'd be bored to death and that he could n't stand it. But he said no; he was happier in that nursing home than he had been for years. They did n't treat him a bit like a celebrity, and all he wanted was to lie there and have his hair brushed.

He lay there three weeks, and I suppose he had his chair brushed, for it lay flatter, which gave him a look of extraordinary well-being and peace. And at the end of three weeks he came to me in my studio by night. Grevill Burton and Furnival were there, and he simply threw himself on our mercy. He said he was still supposed to be in the nursing home. Yes, I was right. He had n't been able to stand it. It was all very well at first. He 'd liked having his hair brushed,-the little nurse who brushed it was distinctly pretty, -but he 'd got tired of it in a week. He'd squared the sister and the nurses and the doctor-squared 'em all round, and if anybody inquired for him at the home, they 'd hear that Mr. Watt Gunn's condition was about the same, and that he was not allowed to see anybody. If Furny liked to put a paragraph in that rag of his about his condition being the same, he might.

Thus, with a delicious, childlike joy in his own ingenuity, he spun the first threads of the tangle that afterward immeshed him.

He went down into the country to write a book. Nobody but Burton and I (we could n't trust Furny) knew where he was. Officially, he was in the nursing home. Mrs. Folyat-Raikes called there every day, and brought back the bulletin,

and published it all round. He'd reckoned on that.

Well, he kept it up for weeks, months. Burton and I went down to see him in September. We found him chuckling over the success of his plot. He admitted it had been a bit expensive. His three weeks. in the home, at fifteen guineas a week, had come to forty-five pounds. With doctors. and one thing and another the game had cost him over seventy. But it was, he said, money well invested. It would mean hundreds and thousands of pounds in his pocket-a hundred pounds, he'd calculated, for every week he was supposed to be still there. He'd finished his book, and if he could keep it up only a few months longer, he thought he could easily. do another. He was so fit, he said, he could do 'em on his head.

It struck me there was something ominous in his elation. For the thing presently began to leak out. I swear it was n't through me or Burton or even Furny; but, you see, the entire staff of the nursing home was in the secret, and the nurses may have talked to patients; you don't have Watt Gunn in a nursing home for nothing. Anyhow, I was rung up one day by Mrs. Folyat-Raikes. I heard her uncanny telephone voice saying, "Do you know what has become of Mr. Watt Gunn?" I answered as coolly as I could that I did n't.

And then the voice squeaked in my ear, "I hear he 's broken down completely and gone away, leaving no address."

I called a taxi then and there, and went round to Cadogan Gardens. I found the poor lady wilder and more haggard than ever. You may imagine what it meant to her.

She dropped her voice to tell me that her information was authentic. Mr. Watt Gunn was not in the nursing home. He never had been in a nursing home at all. She had not written to him because she understood that letters were not allowed in the institution.

That was where Watt Gunn's ingenuity had landed him. The story was all over London in three days. She was bound to spread it to account for his non-appearance at her parties. You could n't stop it. It had got into the papers. And though Watt Gunn's publisher, in view of his forthcoming novel, published emphatic

contradictions, nobody believed them. And when the book, his masterpiece, came out, the effect on his royalties was lamentable. In America it simply ruined him.

He tried desperately to recover, to live it down. He had some scheme of going on a lecturing tour in the States; but his agents made inquiries, and advised him not to. A lecturing tour in the States, they said, at the present juncture would prove a miserable fiasco, even if he could effect a landing. He, the darling of the He, the darling of the American public, whose triumph on "the other side" had been a gorgeous fairy-tale,

It was sharper because of the peace that he had known. I can't tell you all Mrs. Folyat-Raikes's ruses, and Watt Gunn's revolts and flights, his dastardly and pitiable shifts. He had, I believe, a matrimonial project which he abandoned as too drastic, besides being probably ineffectual. And then he did a really clever thing. It served him for a whole season.

I ought to tell you that Mrs. FolyatRaikes was the most straight-laced hostess of her generation. of her generation. Nobody was admitted to her house who had once figured in a scandal. And Watt Gunn had never fig

saw himself returned on his country's hands as an insane alien.

His American publisher, terrified by these rumors, came over himself for the sole purpose of seeing what was the matter with Watt Gunn, and despite all that Burton, Furnival, and I could tell him, he was not altogether reassured. He went about too much. Besides, by this time Watt Gunn had got so nervy over it all that his behavior lent itself to suspicion.

Then the poor little chap persuaded himself that his only chance was to be seen again at Mrs. Folyat-Raikes's. For the next three months he was seen there and everywhere. Furny published a funny account of the whole thing, and Watt Gunn was ultimately reinstated. And the struggle and the agony began all over again.

ured, had never desired to figure; he could n't, he used to say, be bored. Really, he had preserved the virtues and traditions of his class, besides being constitutionally timid in seductive presences. Then suddenly and conspicuously, in the beginning of the season, he figured. of the season, he figured. He appearedyou may remember it-as co-respondent in a rather bad divorce case. There were three other co-respondents, but they had been kept out of it in the interests of Watt Gunn. I don't know how he had worked it; anyhow, the little chap appeared, wearing his borrowed purple with an air of reckless magnificence in sin. I can see him now, solemn and flushed with the weight and importance of it, stalking slowly up the staircase of the Old Marlborough Club, trailing that gorgeous