was going to be brave and happy. After all, they still had Sundays, some half-Saturdays and all the official holidays to themselves. O, Washington, Lincoln, patriots that made the Fourth of July, Presidents that proclaim Thanksgiving-how salaried employees in the great towns do love you! For do you not mean an extra holiday for them?

Johnnie did work overtime, and on the anniversary of their marriage he strode into the flat and put a board-backed savingsbank book on the table by her plate. Its contents had been his secret.

"Six hundred dollars, John," she murmured, brokenly, and rushed into the kitchen.

"I'm not boohooing, John," she denied when he followed her. "I'm no baby. There's been something in my eye all day long and I am trying to wash it out at the sink. That's all."

"But it is just fine, John," she said after she had sat down at table again. "You must have slaved."

"Nothing at all, my dear, nothing at all." "And to think that you won't let me even launder your shirts."

"Nonsense; I'll not have you a drudge, Alice. You do too much already."

"There will be a thousand by Christmas," she said softly.

"Hardly that, but by next summer anyhow," he answered, his eyes burning over her.

Then came the winter with the overtime work again. The extra pay was by the hour, so that the inspired Johnnie often didn't get home until midnight. The bank account was nearing eight hundred dollars, would be quite that with his December salary, which was already half earned, leaving a plenty over for celebrating Christmas much more adequately than he and she had celebrated it the year before.

On a Monday night in the third week of December, his head throbbing with such pain that he could no longer see the figures on the book before him, Johnnie gave up the idea of attempting five additional hours that evening and started anxiously toward his home at 8.30 o'clock; the restfulness and peace there called to him these days. In the walk from the elevated-railroad station up the quiet street in which he lived his head cleared somewhat. The air was cold and clear and invigorating, and he decided to pace up and down in front of the flat for a few minutes, that he might get the good of more of the bracing air.

"She must not see that I have been in pain," he mused. "It would worry her." He walked slowly back and forth on the opposite side of the street, his eyes looking tenderly up at those two shaded windows on the third floor that marked their big chamber, the combination bed and sittingroom. What was she doing now? He tried to visualize her in the flat. Often of late she had been sitting down when he came in, a strange little smile on her face, with a book in her hands. That was only a pose, he knew; he always suspected then that she had been toiling in that wonderful kitchen of hers and that she had assumed the pose when he rang the vestibule bell just to make him think she had grown to be an insatiable reader.

Johnnie, his eyes on the windows, stopped, catching his breath. The wind leaped up and screamed around through the rows of flat-houses. There was oceans of air to breathe, but Johnnie could not open and close his lungs. His heart seemed to

be in a spasm, then it seemed to be drying up. From some near-by parlor came the muted whine of a gramophone, from some kitchen the oniony odor of a belated dinner, and though only a little of these got through to Johnnie's consciousness he loathed that little with an unaccustomed intensity.

There she stood-Johnnie easily recognized every line of that dear head and figure behind the shades-with her hands on the shoulders of a figure he could not recognize. But this strange figure hadn't the bulk of head that a woman's hair gives. Was it a man? How tenderly now she touched the figure here and there! Then she put her arms around the shadowed neck, imprinted a kiss on the shadowed face, put her hands on the shoulders-and the two faded out of sight.

Johnnie's mind leaped loyally to an explanation. "Her brother has come for a Christmas visit," he breathed. And though she had said nothing about expecting him, Johnnie held to the idea of her brother.

He almost shouted for joy at his divination. Whistling loudly, he strode across the street, rang the vestibule bell and went gayly up the two flights of stairs.

Alice was sitting demurely in her rockingchair with that book in her hands. Johnnie stood silent inside the door for a minute. She got up and walked toward him.

"Hold still, boy, and let me kiss you," she said severely. "You are dodging me

now."

"No, I'm tired," he parried wearily. "That's the reason I came home early; I planned to work late to-night. All alone to-day?"

"All except my book. Oh, don't you worry, John," she ran on lightly as she helped him off with his overcoat. "I'm not letting myself get sad and lonesome as I did at first. I go out to the park and take a lot of exercise. I like to see the people, though I didn't used to, you know. I think I'll be a regular New Yorker pretty soon."

"Yes," he said, with a touch of grimness in his voice, walking into the dining-room and sitting down for a light lunch he always had before going to bed. Alice anticipated all his wants with anxious and gentle solicitude.

"Haven't you had a single visitor since I left this morning?" he asked. "Nobody at all?"

"Not a soul. I suppose everybody is getting ready for Christmas, and besides there are only two or three women that I visit, you know."

Maybe you think Johnnie ought to have stood up then and demanded firmly to know the whole truth. Maybe you despise him as a mean-spirited cur. Maybe you think that Alice's little attentions would only have maddened a real man. Well, it may be that Johnnie hasn't the bold and raging spirit of a lion. But somehow or other he could not yet think anything definitely evil about that pleasant-faced, cleareyed, wholesome-looking woman over there across the table. He would not permit the full light of his consciousness to play on the horrid thing that skulked in the dim outskirts of his mind. With tremendous effort he held his judgment in absolute abeyance for the time. And so, acting somewhat confusedly, and thus attracting more of Alice's uneasy attentions, he went silently to bed.

"You are working too hard at that old office, John," she whispered. "Don't do it, please. It isn't worth while at all."

He answered nothing, and after a night of writhing torture rose and went mechanically through the routine at home. At the office he followed the line of least resistance, which was the line of his regular work, even accomplishing some intricate tonnage calculations. And at the end of the day he rode home again; that seemed the natural thing to do.

Johnnie ate,

Alice was cooking dinner. smoked a pipe, crept to bed. She showed signs of increasing uneasiness. His mind seized that fact, holding it with others that were to be used, he felt vaguely, in a final conclusion.

The next day, at his desk, he suddenly found himself staring vacantly at a long column of figures that he had set himself to an hour before, and he was saying to himself, "What shall I do if it is true?" "If what is true?" he furiously questioned himself, and did not answer. Then, after a long time, he said, "I must make sure first."

He would stay at the office after dinner every night now, going home at different times varying from 8 to 10 o'clock. He would stand opposite the flat-house and watch those shaded windows on the third floor.

This was on Wednesday. That night and on Thurdsay and Friday nights he saw the shadow of Alice and the strange shadow in the front room. "The man must live in the same house," he concluded. Johnnie decided that those little caressing motions he saw must be Alice fondling the lapel of his coat, his tie, the very buttons on his clothes. "She can't keep her hands off him," he thought bitterly.

Yet on these nights he walked slowly across the street and went upstairs after ringing the vestibule bell, and once he heard some whispering in the third-floor hallway and then a door softly closing. Let them be lulled into carelessness first. Let them think that he was a soft-headed ninny whom it was easy to deceive. He found, on these nights, Alice sitting in the rockingchair holding that book in her hands. Johnnie conceived a violent hatred for it, though it was only an old "Paradise Lost" he had used in his English class at school.

On Saturday afternoons he and Alice usually went out for what they had called a lark, meaning a leisurely stroll, a restaurant dinner, and a theatre. Oh, but these had been rich with joy, absolutely rich. But on this Saturday morning when Johnnie started out he mumbled, "I'll have to work this

afternoon; won't be home till 6 o'clock." She said he was doing too much extra work, and yet he noticed furtively that her face cleared when he said he would not be home.

"Well, you can ease up after Christmas," she said, kissing him good-by.

How could he ease up after Christmas? Would there not still be some two hundred dollars to save for the one thousand dollars? She knew that. But maybe now the one thousand dollars didn't mean anything. After all, she had heart enough to want to keep him from unnecessary work.

The suspicion that had skulked on the dim outskirts of Johnnie's consciousnes at first had stalked round and round in everdecreasing circles until now, having attained horrid clearness of outline, it occupied the centre of his mind, and there was nothing else there day or night. His routine had loosened its hold on him entirely; he hadn't done any real work in the last three days. Stopping in at the savings bank, he drew out the seven hundred and ninety dollars and drifted on up the Bowery, buying a pistol in a pawnshop, a box of cartridges in a hardware store further up.

A Third Avenue elevated train took him to Harlem, where he looked up his boardinghouse. This morning he did not loathe it. As he wandered aimlessly along the dingy street he heard the strident voice of his onetime landlady in her front hall; it did not make an unpleasant impression on him. If he could only be back there, and just as he was before that office-boy had said, "Old Johnnie!" Of course he was no longer a youth. Why had that epithet burned into him and set him on fire with silly old ambitions that were not for him? The wise adjust themselves to circumstances; he should have gone on as he was. After all, was that not a smooth and peaceful way?

Taking the subway to Times Square, Johnnie drifted on down Broadway. The shop-windows were full of Christmas brilliances. There was an unusual vivacity in the street crowds, due, he thought, to the increased proportion of boys and girls, freed from schools for the holidays, who were getting ready for the best of all the festival times.

Here and there Johnnie touched a window with his hand wistfully. How he loved this city! It almost ignored him, to be sure, but he had fancied of late that it had begun to be genial with him. It mattered not whether this was true, he loved it ardently. And then was this not a sort of farewell visit? There was a sad and longing good-by in his every move

ment.

The posters in front of the theatres halted him, and he read through the colored print, noting the quoted commendations from The Times, The Sun, The Herald, and all the rest, of the shows inside; wondering, too, how it could be that he noticed these things.

In a department-store window at Thirtyfourth Street he saw some furs. A twopiece set marked $49.99 attracted him. "I was going to get her something like that this Christmas," he thought. "All women like furs." Touching the pistol in his pocket with his hand, he sighed deeply and drifted on down Broadway with the crowds.

Noticing a dairy-lunch room, he went inside and ate, rejoining then the slow-moving throng. It began to snow; the whitness of the flakes annoyed Johnnie, he didn't know why. He was getting cold. He noted that he was lagging more and more in his return to Brooklyn. Yet he must go on.

Finally, at Fourteenth Street, in a burst of flaring anger, he bustled down into the Subway station determinedly and rode to the Brooklyn Bridge, boarding an elevated train there for South Brooklyn. The snow was an inch thick on the ground when he left the train, and the wind from the near-by bay was blowing up a cold that soaked into the bones unless one hurried.

But Johnnie was lagging again. He didn't want to go up his street; he hated what he seemed to divine was up there. He dawdled in front of delicatessen-shop windows, tailors' windows, and laundryshop windows, looking long at the sausages, suits, and shirts as if they were thrilling sights.

Now he was opposite the flat. Behind the lace-curtains he could see some one moving around now and then. It was 4 o'clock, and the winter darkness was creeping over the city. With his shoulders hunched up, his face ashy pale, his heart pounding like the gloomy beats in a funeral march, Johnnie marched across the street, entered the vestibule, did not ring the downstairs bell, tipped up the stairs, stopping in front of his door.

Alice was saying a word occasionally in a low voice. Johnnie gripped his pistol, hunching his shoulders higher and closer together. He was very cold. The gas-jet in the dark hallway leaped and danced with a mocking gayety.