pered, clutching my wrist with his
damp, shaking fingers. "Stay--a minute."

"But you want something to pull you round. I shan't be two seconds," I
answered, trying to unclasp his clinging fingers.

"Never mind! Oh, Vic, for God's sake stay."

There was an abject appeal in the bloodshot eyes, a desperate tenacity
in his clutch. He looked at me as if he dared look nowhere else. Some
horror seemed pressing upon his confused and weakened brain, and I
thought I could soothe him best by staying.

"Very well--there, I'm not going," I said, reassuringly.

Still he did not relax his grip upon me, but his eyes closed again, and
he seemed satisfied. I sat down on a chair at the bedside and waited.
The sun poured brighter and brighter through the blinds and touched up
the mantelpiece.

The photograph of Faina's sister, surrounded by some others of her set,
was propped up in the centre of it, on a couple of paper volumes. My
own head was aching violently now, and after a time the woman's figure
on the glossy, sun-flecked surface of the card began to sway and swim
before my eyes as I looked lazily at it.

The minutes passed by and Howard did not move. At last, I ventured to
try and withdraw my stiffening arm without rousing him, but at the
first movement his fingers tightened and his groans recommenced.

After a time my hunger passed into drowsiness. I leant forward
gradually, and at last my head sank down on the edge of his bed, and I
drifted into oblivion.

CHAPTER IV.

May had come round again. The days and weeks had glided by in a
monotony of work, varied by feverish blanks when I could do nothing,
and the pile of manuscript lay growing dusty in its corner. Then at
last the day arrived when the final line was written and the whole
despatched. That was three months back, three months of anxious
waiting, in which Howard had chaffed me daily on my looks and health.

"You're dwindling to a most interesting skeleton, Vic," he used to say.
"Catch me bothering myself about anything I wrote in the same way."

Now, however, it was over. I had just left the publisher's office. The
book had been accepted, and I was a free man. A gush of fresh life ran
through me and stirred in my veins in response to the fresh life of
spring that seemed in the sunny air, in the green leaves fluttering
round the Bourse, in the white butterflies that floated across the
dusty asphalt.

When I got back I found Howard half asleep in the