d. Jos sat merely gaping--a gape that merged by
imperceptible degrees into a grin. Presently he ceased to watch his
guest. He sat watching his sister.

Not once did Albert himself glance in her direction. She was just
a dim silhouette on the outskirts of his vision. But there she was,
unmoving, and he could feel the fixture of her unseen eyes. The time
was at hand when he would have to meet those eyes. Would he flinch?
Was he master of himself?

The last scrut was powder. No temporising! He jerked his glass to his
mouth. A moment later, holding out his plate to her, he looked Emily
full in the eyes. They were Emily's eyes, but not hers alone. They
were collective eyes--that was it! They were the eyes of stark,
staring womanhood. Her face had been dead white, but now suddenly
up from her throat, over her cheeks, through the down between her
eyebrows, went a rush of colour, up over her temples, through the very
parting of her hair.

"Happen," he said without a quaver in his voice, "I'll have a bit
more, like."

She flung her arms forward on the table and buried her face in them.
It was a gesture wild and meek. It was the gesture foreseen and yet
incredible. It was recondite, inexplicable, and yet obvious. It was
the only thing to be done--and yet, by gum, she had done it.

Her brother had risen from his seat and was now at the door. "Think
I'll step round to the Works," he said, "and see if they banked up
that furnace aright."

NOTE.--_The author has in preparation a series of volumes
dealing with the life of Albert and Emily Grapp._

ENDEAVOUR

_By_

J*HN G*LSW*RTHY

The dawn of Christmas Day found London laid out in a shroud of snow.
Like a body wasted by diseases that had triumphed over it at last,
London lay stark and still now, beneath a sky that was as the closed
leaden shell of a coffin. It was what is called an old-fashioned
Christmas.

Nothing seemed to be moving except the Thames, whose embanked waters
flowed on sullenly in their eternal act of escape to the sea. All
along the wan stretch of Cheyne Walk the thin trees stood exanimate,
with not a breath of wind to stir the snow that pied their
soot-blackened branches. Here and there on the muffled ground lay a
sparrow that had been frozen in the night, its little claws sticking
up heavenward. But here and there also those tinier adventurers of the
London air, smuts, floated vaguely and came to rest on the snow--signs
that in the s