t mention, when Anne
decided not to marry you."

The colonel grinned, a trifle consciously. "Well, Anne meant youth, you
comprehend, and all the things we then believed in, Jack. It would have
been decidedly difficult to live up to such a contract, and--as it
were--to fulfil every one of the implied specifications!"

"And yet"--here Charteris flicked his cigarette--"Anne ruled in the
stead of Aline Van Orden. And Aline, in turn, had followed Clarice
Pendomer. And before the coming of Clarice had Pauline Romeyne, whom
time has converted into Polly Ashmeade, reigned in the land--"

"Don't be an ass!" the colonel pleaded; and then observed,
inconsequently: "I can't somehow quite realize Aline is dead. Lord,
Lord, the letters that I wrote to her! She sent them all back, you know,
in genuine romantic fashion, after we had quarreled. I found those
boyish ravings only the other day in my father's desk at Matocton, and
skimmed them over. I shall read them through some day and appropriately
meditate over life's mysteries that are too sad for tears."

He meditated now.

"It wouldn't be quite equitable, Jack," the colonel summed it up, "if
the Aline I loved--no, I don't mean the real woman, the one you and all
the other people knew, the one that married the enterprising brewer and
died five years ago--were not waiting for me somewhere. I can't express
just what I mean, but you will understand, I know--?"

"That heaven is necessarily run on a Mohammedan basis? Why, of course,"
said Mr. Charteris. "Heaven, as I apprehend it, is a place where we
shall live eternally among those ladies of old years who never
condescended actually to inhabit any realm more tangible than that of
our boyish fancies. It is the obvious definition; and I defy you to
evolve a more enticing allurement toward becoming a deacon."

"You romancers are privileged to talk nonsense anywhere," the colonel
estimated, "and I suppose that in the Lichfield you have made famous,
Jack, you have a double right."

"Ah, but I never wrote a line concerning Lichfield. I only wrote about
the Lichfield whose existence you continue to believe in, in spite of
the fact that you are actually living in the real Lichfield," Charteris
returned. "The vitality of the legend is wonderful."

He cocked his head to one side--an habitual gesture with Charteris--and
the colonel noted, as he had often done before, how extraordinarily
reminiscent Jack was of a dried-up, quizzical black