"

"Why sure!" faltered Miss Fraenkel. "They get--get married! That's the
end of every English story, isn't it?"

Bill cackled from the kitchen, artlessly and shrill. "----and lived
happy ever after!" added Miss Fraenkel, with radiant unwinking hazel
eyes.

She went away after tea, to her pew in the gaunt wooden Episcopal Church
in Chestnut Street, rapt in a felicitous dream of romanticism. It was
nothing to her that Mr. Carville had poured diluted vitriol upon some
women who clamoured for the vote, nothing that he had barely deigned to
notice her existence. Once aware that he essayed to be a spell-binder,
she accepted him with utter _abandon_ in that role. She permitted him to
bind the spell; and as she walked with short quick steps along Van
Diemen's Avenue, her brown head held high and unswerving, I could not
refrain from the fancy that she moved as one in a trance.

It was a disappointment to us that we heard the whistle of the five
o'clock train before we realized that Mr. Carville was on board. The
sound was the one thing needful to set our mind and tongues free to talk
of him. So potent had been his atmosphere that, to be honest, we had
been unable to apply judgment to his case. When we gathered at dinner
the discussion was in full and amiable swing.

"It is very difficult," I said, "to distinguish the fact from the
fiction, not because he is extraordinarily skilful in 'joining his
flats,' but because he is so absorbed in the story himself that it would
be quite inconceivable to him that anyone would _not_ be interested. He
has evidently never imagined such a contingency. Such ingeniousness is
more than uncommon. It is sublime."

"How about your theory that he is an artist?" argued Mac. "He can't be
both conscious and unconscious of his art."

"Yes, he can," I replied. "All great artists are. Mind, I don't pretend
that Mr. Carville is a great artist. I merely state the fact that he has
one of their attributes. I account for it this way. We have here a man
of undeniable powers but limited ambition. At certain periods in his
life he has been crossed by his remarkable brother, a man whom we now
know to have not only brain-power, but will-power. This brother has
impressed himself upon our neighbour's imagination. You noticed almost
admiration in his voice at times as he spoke of his brother? It has been
his whim, therefore, to accentuate as much as possible the difference
between them. He has, moreover, culti