long while, and died.

* * * * *

That space stands for the interval of silence that fell after
Christopher had told me the story. I thought he had quite finished. He
sat motionless, his shoulders fallen forward, his eyes fixed in the
heart of the incandescent globe over the dressing-table, his long
fingers wrapped around the neck of the 'cello.

"And so she got me through those years," he said. "Those nip-and-tuck
years that followed. By her lie.

"Insanity is a queer thing," he went on, still brooding into the light.
"There's more of it about than we're apt to think. It works in so many
ways. In hobbies, arts, philosophies. Music is a kind of insanity. I
know. I've got mine penned up in the music now, and I think I can keep
it there now, and save my soul."

"Yours?"

"Yes, mine. I know now--now that it's safe for me to know. I was down
at that village by the beach a year or so ago. I'm a Kain, of course,
one of the crazy Kains, after all. John Sanderson was born in the
village and lived there till his death. Only once that folks could
remember had he been away, and that was when he took some papers to the
city for Mrs. Kain to sign. He was caretaker at the old 'Kain place' the
last ten years of his life, and deaf, they said, since his tenth
year--'deaf as a post.' And they told me something else. They said there
was a story that before my father, Daniel, married her, my mother had
been an actress. An actress! You'll understand that I needed no one to
tell me _that_!

"They told me that they had heard a story that she was a _great_
actress. Dear God, if they could only know! When I think of that night
and that setting, that scene! It killed her, and it got me over the
wall--"

THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL

By BEN AMES WILLIAMS

From _Saturday Evening Post_

I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. "Hazen," I asked, "are you
going to town to-day?"

"Yes, yes," he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. "Of course I'm
going to town."

"I've a matter of business," I suggested.

"Come along," he invited brusquely. "Come along."

There was not another man within forty miles to whom he would have given
that invitation.

"I'll be down in ten minutes," I promised him; and I went to pull on my
Pontiacs and heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the
sandy snow. It was bitterly cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay--I
could see it from my window