s
condition, which Rattray, at Elfrida's express desire,
had exacted. As it happened, nobody can ever know precisely
what he wrote, except Mr. Pitt, who has forgotten, and
Mr. Arthur Rattray, who tries to forget; for the letter,
the morning after it had been received, which was the
morning after the portrait met its fate, lay in a little
charred heap in the fireplace of Elfrida's room, when
Janet Cardiff pushed the screen aside at last and went in.

Kendal had come as he promised, and told her everything.
He had not received quite the measure of indignant sympathy
he had expected, and Janet had not laughed at the asterisks.
On the other hand, she had sent him away, with unnatural
gravity-of demeanor, rather earlier than he meant to go,
and without telling him why. She thought, as she directed
the cabman to Essex Court, Fleet Street, that she would
tell him why afterward; and all the way there she thought
of the most explicit terms in which to inform Elfrida
that her letter had been the product of hardness of heart,
that she really felt quite differently, and had come to
tell her, purely for honesty's sake, how she did feel.

After a moment of ineffectual calling on the other side
of the screen, her voice failed her, and in dumb terror
that would not be reasoned away it seemed that she saw
the outlines of the long, still, slender figure under
the bed draperies, while she still looked helplessly at
a flock of wild geese flying over Fugi Yama. Buddha smiled
at her from the table with a kind of horrid expectancy,
and the litter, of papers round him, in Elfrida's
handwriting, mixed their familiarity with his mockery.
She had only to drag her trembling limbs a little further
to know that the room was pregnant with the presence of
death. Some white tuberoses in a vase seemed to make it
palpable with their fragrance. She ran wildly to the
window and drew back the curtain; the pale sunlight
flooding in gave a little white nimbus to a silver ring
upon the floor.

The fact may not be without interest that six months
afterward "An Adventure in Stage-Land" was published by
Messrs. Lash and Black, and met with a very considerable
success. Mr. Arthur Rattray undertook its disposal, with
the consent of Mr. and Mrs. Leslie Bell, who insisted,
without much difficulty, that he should receive a percentage
of the profits for his trouble. Mr. Rattray was also of
assistance to them when, as soon as the expense could be
managed, the