d laugh.

"He always hated me," he said. "I told him he had traded his genius
for drink, and he never forgave me. Where is he now?"

"Now?" Cake looked up at him in startled wonder. It came over her
suddenly that he counted upon the lodger's being in the Imperial
Theatre that night.

"Now?" she repeated. "Why, he is dead."

It took Noyes a minute to recover. "What will you do?" he asked her.
"Will you go on from this start, continue this--this sort of success?"
He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was
the only kind she was ever destined to make. He waited for her answer,
wondering, and a little awestruck. It seemed to him they had come to
the supreme test of her genius.

And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth--such
tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been
born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what
it actually revealed when she arrived.

"I will go on from this success," she said. Involuntarily she raised
her hand to her breast. "I must, since it is the only way for me. You
see," with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, "I must
be famous."

And she smiled that smile that hurt him, the smile the world loves and
will give anything to see.

The most famous funmaker of her time looked away from the bright river
fleeting beyond the trees to her giggling, half-terrified visitors.

"Fame," she said, "is a secret that cannot be told. It must be
discovered by the seeker. Let me offer you tea as a substitute."

MUMMERY

By THOMAS BEER

From _Saturday Evening Post_

On Monday Mrs. Egg put her husband on the east-bound express with many
orders. He was not to annoy Adam by kissing him when they met, if they
met in public. He was to let Adam alone in the choice of civil dress,
if Adam wanted to change his naval costume in New York. He was not to
get lost in Brooklyn, as he had done before. He was to visit the
largest moving-picture theatres and report the best films on his
return. She made sure that Egg had her written list of lesser commands
safe in his wallet, then folded him to her bosom, sniffed, and patted
him up the steps of the coach.

A red-haired youth leaned through an open window and inquired, "Say,
lady, would you mind tellin' me just what you weigh?"

"I ain't been on the scales in years, bub," said Mrs. Egg equably;
"not since about when you was born. Does your mamma ever wash out