gnment, which promised to be a
zestful pleasure trip. Chancing upon Griswold in the first flush of his
elation, he had dragged the New Yorker around to Chaudiere's to play
second knife and fork at a small parting feast. Not that it had required
much persuasion. Griswold had fasted for twenty-four hours, and he would
have broken bread thankfully with an enemy. And if Bainbridge were not a
friend in a purist's definition of the term, he was at least a friendly
acquaintance.

Until the twenty-four-hour fast was in some measure atoned for, the
burden of the table-talk fell upon Bainbridge, who lifted and carried it
generously on the strength of his windfall. But no topic can be
immortal; and when the vacation under pay had been threshed out in all
its anticipatory details it occurred to the host that his guest was less
than usually responsive; a fault not to be lightly condoned under the
joyous circumstances. Wherefore he protested.

"What's the matter with you to-night, Kenneth, old man? You're more than
commonly grumpy, it seems to me; and that's needless."

Griswold took the last roll from the joint bread-plate and buttered it
methodically.

"Am I?" he said. "Perhaps it is because I am more than commonly hungry.
But go on with your joy-talk: I'm listening."

"That's comforting, as far as it goes; but I should think you might say
something a little less carefully polarized. You don't have a chance to
congratulate lucky people every day."

Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted
cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that
which he hath.'"

Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.

"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or
pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say
you envied me."

"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough
money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in."

"Oh, cat's foot!--anybody can do that," asserted Bainbridge, with the
air of one to whom the struggle for existence has been a mere athlete's
practice run.

"I know; that is your theory. But the facts disprove it. I can't, for
one."

"Oh, yes, you could, if you'd side-track some of your own theories and
come down to sawing wood like the rest of us. But you won't do that."

Griswold was a fair