wing mother and the
weak invalid father, who must be now hastening back to their dying son
as fast as trains could bear them.

Condemn, pity, ridicule, which you will; but the fact remains. A kind
of panic had attacked Richard Frayne, and he prepared for the folly he
was about to commit. There were the two courses open--a frank, manly
meeting of the consequences, whatever they might be, or the act of a
coward.

The hours passed, and his mind was fully made up. And now everything he
did was in a quiet, decisive fashion, with as much method in his madness
as ever the great poet endowed his Danish hero.

He changed his clothes, putting on the quiet dark tweed suit Jerry
missed, and went back into his room, to stand there in the gloom,
looking round and vainly trying to make out the various objects there,
every one being loved like some old friend.

But he could not look the farewell, and began slowly to go round the
room, laying his hand upon each in turn--his favourite books and
pictures, his piano, the violin, the cornet, and the big 'cello in its
case where it stood in the corner--all such dear old friends, and it was
good-bye for ever!

And as he went on, his hand at last touched the little, long morocco
case lying upon the side-table.

He clutched it hard, and something like a sob struggled to his lips; for
that case contained, in company with the little piccolo, the flute that
was once the property of the brave old soldier whose helmet hung dented
there with its drooping black horse-hair plume.

Richard's thoughts went back into the past, and he recalled the evenings
when he as a little child was enraptured listening to some operatic
selection brilliantly played, while his mother sat accompanying upon the
piano. Then he recollected the first lessons given him by his father
upon that very flute, and years after the plaudits he listened to with
burning cheeks after he had played one of his father's favourite pieces
with such skill and execution that these words followed:

"Keep the flute, Dick, my boy, for my sake; it is yours."

And now he was bidding it farewell for ever--there in the darkness of
that lonely night, whose silence was broken from time to time by the
chiming and booming of the great Cathedral clock, which once more, to
his disordered imagination, seemed associated with a solemn procession
to the tomb.

Richard Frayne's breast swelled and his hands trembled as his fingers
clung round tha