to be punished a little. I hope," he added, humbly, "that you won't be very angry!" Betty looked across the country and began to wonder why she wasn't angry at all.

"It was very mean of you!" she said rather weakly.

Buster took her hand again.

"That isn't the meanest thing I've done," he declared boldly. "I have deceived you from first to last. I am not a chauffeur at all, Miss McLean-that is, I am not a professional, though I do happen to carry a license."

"Then why in the world-"

"I told you the reason. It was a woman."

"I don't believe your name is Buster Smith at all!" she cried, drawing away her hand.

"It isn't!" he declared impudently, leaning over so that he looked right into her eyes. "My name is Harvey Anstruther!"

Betty cried out at that, but he seized her hands and held them firmly.

"You tried to run away from me!" he declared. "I made up my mind you

shouldn't. I had heard so much about you so much that I liked—and I had always wanted to know the daughter of my father's chum."

Betty struggled hard.

"I am terribly angry!" she declaredand Anstruther laughed.

"Oh, no!" he said confidently. "You are going to forgive me. I see it in your eyes. We are going to be friends," he added, and then, leaning still closer, he said, "We are going to be more than friends!"

Betty's eyes fell before him.

"What is the use of trifling?" he said with growing passion. "I knew the moment I saw you how it was all going to end. Now that I have been in your service, I never want to leave it. Betty, I love you!" he said, and after his own bold fashion, he put his arm around her. "I want you to marry me, darling! Will you ?"

Tony lifted his head in surprise, for Betty was letting this strange man kiss her, and when the motor car finally started, she was sitting on the front seat beside him!

ERNALD looked up at the darkened windows of Witherspoon Hall and sighed. "Good old Princeton," he remarked. "Doesn't seem six years since we left, does it?" The tone was serene. It seemed to bring the memories of the life we had lived after our last song on the steps of Old North into perspective, to arrange one's experiences in an orderly way with the steady glow of college affections at the clear, bright end of the vista.

"We both roomed in Witherspoon," I responded, as if this were, after all, the great satisfaction. He sighed again comfortably, relaxing the keenness of his glances. "We were a jolly crowd," he said heartily, "and I wonder how all the fellows are getting on. There's Macken

zie and you and I; and then there was Feinnes. By the way, I haven't seen Feinnes II at a reunion these three years. What's the lad doing?"

We pondered the question, though there was really no doubt in our minds. Fernald voiced our conclusion, warmly, remembering Feinnes quite familiarly. "He was steady as a clock. Of course, he's still with his father in Pittsburg. Leather and findings, wasn't it?"

"He never was brilliant, not a bit," I added.

"But solid." Fernald filled his pipe. Holding the bowl in his hand, he paused to define more clearly his notion of our classmate's character. "I always thought his mind moved with a sort of friction. He was slow-slow like an old man. I never exactly liked his way of viewing life. There was no lightness, no vivacity. But he was tremendously steady. 'Leather and findings' suited him to the ground. He'll make money-honestly. He'll love one girl. What they call the salt of the earth. But, do you know, I doubt if he was always sure what college meant to some of us others. We joked about things. He never lost sight

of the fact that he was Feinnes II, the son of Feinnes, '53."

I admitted that he had never been possessed of a sense of humor so keen as that of others. Fernald lit his pipe and waving the flaming match in the night smiled at me over its glow. "After all," he said, "Feinnes was what you and I call 'dumb'." The match went suddenly out and Fernald's face went back into the darkness, as if he had appeared for the moment, only to utter this kindly judgment. In silence we shook hands and then he swung away down the dim white walk, under the arch of Blair and I lost him as I had lost others before, emerging from college into the world through that gateway.

As I stood waiting for an impulse, a light came into a window high up in Witherspoon. Some lonely chap, not yet gone with the rest of the students for the summer, was there. That's Feinnes' old room, I thought. How often I had come in upon him there of an evening to find him warm over a book, struggling with a subject quite alien to his bent. It had been comedy for me to watch his quiet agonies to comprehend, his pride when he had, by brute force, reduced the matter to terms of leather and findings, so to speak.

As I finally passed along on my way the light remained, with the effect of a revival of Feinnes II in my thoughts, even to the extent that I wondered whether he, too, steady and "dumb," had been, like the others of us, entangled and inextricably bound by the snares of life; or whether, by his slow strength, he had kept in the safe thoroughfare of "leather and findings."

Six months later I picked up an agate, on the slender beach running like a gentle step from the margin of the Japan sea to the village of Shirakami. From the familiar stone I looked out on the blue and sparkling water brimming to the lip of the sky. A sampan sail leaned lightly on the breeze a mile from shore, as if caught in airy flight by a sudden

liquefaction of the firmament. The dry sound of bamboos in the wind was behind me. Only the agate was homely, and I held it against the light, amazed to have discovered there what seemed to have been warmed by my own hand in another country. I was made less exultant by the sound of feet crunching the gravel near me. I did not care to lose the substance of my dream by looking upon the thin legs of a Japanese hideous in European dress. The footsteps passed between me and the gentle surf. They ceased to sound, and I looked up. "Hello!" said

a man roughly dressed in sailor's slops. The thick beard redeemed his presence in a land where the whisker is thin and wiry. "I saw your name on your boxes," he continued gravely. "You ought not to leave them on the wharf. It's not business-like. Don't you remember me? I'm Feinnes II."

The agate was not so genial to my palm before this fresher apparition from home. I would have answered quickly and affectionately, but that the air was peculiarly deceptive as regards distances. For an instant I considered whether my voice could reach him. "You're Princeton ninety-odd ?" he suddenly inquired.

For

We shook hands formally, then heartily. "I never fancied I should see you here," I apologized. "I thought, of course, you were in the States-back in Pittsburg."

"I left there three years ago. Didn't you hear? Father wanted me to come to Asia and work up trade-in leather and findings, you know." His explanation was monotonously careful.

"No, I didn't hear," I responded, cordially. "I didn't suspect it. We were talking about you at the last class reunion."

"The fellows remember me?" he asked with a frown, as if trying to bring himself into my atmosphere.

"I should say so. They never forget. How are you?"

He was gratified and looked interestedly at the agate in my open hand. "It was all a long time ago, wasn't it?" he murmured. I agreed with him hastily. This might be our common ground of feeling, therefore to be coveted. With a sense that we were queerly strangers I tried to bring some other thing into the circle. "Still in the leather business ?"

I demanded, scanning his shoddy clothes. "No, I turned over my samples and orders to Peyton two years ago. Peyton was thoroughly reliable. I believe he would do well." This cold statement he tempered by a glance that recalled his other assertion about the length of the years.

"What are you doing now?" I asked.

He tossed a pebble with his foot. His brown hands swept down the breast of his jacket with an unfamiliar gesture. "Nothing much," he answered, peering with his gray eyes at the sapphire sea. "Following shipping, mostly. The fellows remember me?" He stopped a second. "Remember me to the fellows when you see them." And he turned his back on me, starting away towards the little town. He had gone but a few steps when he twisted round, with a visible effort, and came back. "Where did you find that agate ?" he asked; "looks like those we used to gather on Lake Huron. Father always summered there." I dropped the stone into his outstretched hand and he departed, this time for good, the breeze wrapping the baggy legs of his trousers about his limbs; to me, a grotesque sign that a shadow had fallen across the ways of Feinnes II, the well-clad, somewhat finical collegian of six years before.

That night as I sat smoking on a crazy bit of wharf, wrapped in my overcoat because of the chill, he found me again. "I was thinking over old times," he said, seating himself a little apart, but so close that I saw the flicker of his deep-set eyes in the moon's rays.

"We're a long distance from Princeton," I responded.

"So I was thinking," he assented. "The years are very big.'

"They seem to have been so with you," I applied it. "To tell the truth, Feinnes, I can't reconcile this with what I fancied of you-what we knew of you. You were the steadiest man in the class; all the fellows thought so. We expected great things of you. And here you are" I paused, precisely at the end of my thoughts.

"That's it," he agreed. "Now I'm-" He did not refuse to fill up the meaning, but seemed to be at a loss. He was waiting, perhaps, I swiftly surmised, as he had been waiting these years. I ventured to

go back over the trail, to set him again in the path with hopes that he might, in a fresh start, reach the open with me. "I thought you were taken into the firm by your father," I said.

"Yes, a week after we graduated. Father thought I'd better take a holiday; but, you know, it seemed hardly the thing. So I went on the road, selling. I did pretty well and father said I was ready to take a higher place. An opening came for building up business in the Orient, and I came. Better, you see, to have a member of the firm resident. We had an office in Hong Kong."

"But you left it, you say?"

He slipped off one shoe, apparently to be rid of some bit of pebble that hurt his foot. Holding the shoe in his hand he looked over at me. "Yes, I quit." He ceased, only to resume by an effort at continuity: "But the business didn't suffer."

It is dangerous to force a confidence. But it struck me as horrible that Feinnes II should sit ill-dressed, on a tottering wharf among the nets of the Yezzo islanders, and there be in the gaze of one who had known him in old times, and still did not comprehend. There was nothing to excuse it. I, as one of his former circle, felt injured, felt an almost personal insecurity in life. I leaned over and put my finger-tip on the hand that held the shoe. "Why?" I demanded, to be ashamed instantly of my loud voice.

. .

He returned my question with pathetic equanimity. "Why? I've often wondered why. And yet, I do know in a way if somebody would find the words for me." His gray eyes rested on mine; they shone pitifully through the moonshot dusk. He even shook the shoe over my hand, as if to convey to me the substance of the torture of his secret.

I sounded for the sore place. "Liquor?" I asked coldly.

"I didn't drink," he said, with simple emphasis on the verb's tense.

"Gambling? Lose money at Sit Que's or Sing Fat's in Hong Kong?"

He looked at me hopefully, apparently expecting that by this process we should attain the definition of his fate. shook his head.

He

The hopeful aspect he had assumed faded. I had exhausted my skill, and was yet beside the truth. "No," he said quickly. "Not that."

We sat long in perplexed silence. I observed the bulk of him under the moon; his round head, neck cleanly moulded, obtuse shoulders, trunk lean, high-bred, flexed nervously. flexed nervously. It was the Feinnes of college a little warped. He held one shoe up, his unshod foot curled under him as he sat. "If not a woman," I said, desperately clutching for a sure hold for both of us, "what was it? How did it happen? Are you the same?"

He listened intently, poised to pounce on the clue. When my words died interrogatively on the air, he deliberately turned, gazed on the sea. The tinkle of a wave rippled to us. A fish plashed beyond. It came over me swiftly, as I watched him, that these slight phenomena of the sea possibly typified the outward show of this dumb soul. What strange wave had come out of his depths to break over the shores of his breeding? What hidden life had been momentarily unsubmerged that he had never forgot, never could forget?

He withdrew his sombre gaze and whispered, skimming_his whispered, skimming his memory for phrases. "I was going from Shanghai across to Nagasaki on business, on an English barque. We were two weeks making the passage, short as it is. It was very pleasant. There was-" he waved the shoe in his hand, stumbling in mental darkness. "There was," he went on in a dry whisper, "a woman."

"But you said "I began, crudely.

"It wasn't her fault," he corrected me. "You see, we were two weeks together. We were in the Inland Sea-you can look into the houses on the little isles, you know, as you pass-she told me " He stopped completely, conveying the impression of an abyss at his feet, one that must be visible to me also.

"She told you what?" I asked desperately.

His eyes sought mine, steadily, without any covering of his desire to be assisted. "It was not a nice story," he said, almost matter-of-fact.

I stared at him, comprehending that the

it at his feet. "A woman ?"

He drew back, shoe in hand, as if he

must speak from the shadow. "And it didn't make it any better that-that-I loved her."

I found myself laughing at the simplicity of the affair. He responded, laughing with me, till I suddenly understood that such cackling mirth was unseemly in Feinnes, steady, thorough-going Feinnes. I put out my hand to stop his indecent tittering. It was horrible. His lips closed slowly and he took in my immediate question. "What did I do?" he leaned forward to tap my knees with his shoe. "I couldn't think of anything," he said, returning to a dry whisper. "There was nothing sure, that I was sure of. The price of oak-tanned leather had gone up one and one-quarter cent. Before God that was all I was quite sure of."

I felt my soul wither within me. I was standing with him on the precipice, and his foot was on the same stone that held me from falling-certainty of what we see and hear. I tried to thrust him away, to save us both from a tumble into the pit. "Of course, now you're going home," I protested, as if the matter had been finished but that moment.

He was puzzled. "Now?" he repeated. "No."

"Why not?" I insisted. "You're rid of her and you owe something to your family. You can forget."

He rejected my meaning querulously. "That wouldn't help," he said.

"Will she come back? Can't you get rid of the thought of her; out from her influence?" I cried.

"I've never seen her since that night,” he answered.

I was put back into the mystery. This was beyond my experience. I could not even return Feinnes' glances, so unsure I was of our partaking of the same life. "What's the matter?" I said miserably. "Why did you throw up your prospects? Why are you in Shirakami?”

"Would you understand if I said I wanted to kill you?"

"You couldn't," I said promptly. "It's not in you. You're Feinnes and you're not that sort."

"I know it," he returned desperately. "I can't do it." He stooped and put on his shoe, as if it were a resumption of a torture that he must endure to the end. The act seemed to close our inter

course, to be a definite taking up of his burden before he passed on. Then, with a steadiness, a decisiveness that amazed me, it was so familiar in the old classmate, he departed.

I let him go. I did not even follow him with a word of farewell. The taint of the East was upon him. He assumed in my mind a place with the vagabonds that blink at the fresh European in every port from La Perouse Straits to the South Seas, unclean, blighted. Yet as I thought of him later, it came back to me how sober he was still. I recalled the fidelity of his eyes, the decency of his mouth. I could not refuse credence to his assertion that his defection from his class had not been a woman's fault. I felt that I must trust him, trust his integrity. He was indeed "dumb," I decided; he could not let in the sunlight on his darkened heart, and he was mentally asphyxiated, as it were. But, after all, I was satisfied to let him go.

A couple of days later a priest from the Catholic University at Hakodate accosted me in the bazaar. He was an Irish friar on a proselytizing tour. His first words were of Feinnes. It was a shock to me to hear the familiar name on his full lips; again I decided that Feinnes was not so deeply lost, seeing that he kept his own name. "I thought that perhaps you would know him," said the friar. "I am interested in him, as he is a gentleman." And he shook his head at me. "I know him," I admitted with reluctance.

A fat hand caressed the shaven crown and the friar assumed an air of perplexity. "Men go to the devil in so many ways," he averred. "This is a novel instance."

"Indeed?" I remarked, my distaste increasing at the thought of this placid priest probing with gross fingers a wound almost intimate to myself.

"It is indeed true," he went on. "The young man came to mehe glanced up keenly to forestall incredulity-"for religious instruction. It is a strange case."

Stifling my curiosity, I returned, "As you justly observe men go to the devil in many ways. But it seems as if they could follow none in peace."

He took my meaning mildly. mildly. "He came to me of his own accord. I think