nineteenth."

"Wednesday--that would be the seventeenth. That was the day ordained for
my slaughter. On that morning, I was the happiest man in the world.
No king could have been so proud and confident as I was. A wonderful
romance had come to me. The most beautiful young woman in the world, the
most talented too, was waiting for me. An express train was carrying me
to her, and it couldn't go fast enough to keep up with my eagerness. She
was very rich, and she loved me, and we were to live in eternal summer,
wherever we liked, on a big, beautiful yacht. No one else had such a
life before him as that. It seemed almost too good for me, but I thought
I had grown and developed so much that perhaps I would be worthy of it.
Oh, how happy I was! I tell you this because--because YOU are not like
the others. You will understand."

"Yes, I understand," she said patiently. "Well--you were being so
happy."

"That was in the morning--Wednesday the seventeenth--early in the
morning. There was a little girl in the car, playing with some buttons,
and when I tried to make friends with her, she looked at me, and she
saw, right at a glance, that I was a fool. 'Out of the mouths of babes
and sucklings,' you know. She was the first to find it out. It began
like that, early in the morning. But then after that everybody knew it.
They had only to look at me and they said: 'Why, this is a fool--like a
little nasty boy; we won't let him into our houses; we find him a bore.'
That is what they said."

"Did SHE say it?" Sister Soulsby permitted herself to ask.

For answer Theron bit his lips, and drew his chin under the fur, and
pushed his scowling face into the pillow. The spasmodic, sob-like gasps
began to shake him again. She laid a compassionate hand upon his hot
brow.

"That is why I made my way here to you," he groaned piteously. "I knew
you would sympathize; I could tell it all to you. And it was so awful,
to die there alone in the strange city--I couldn't do it--with nobody
near me who liked me, or thought well of me. Alice would hate me. There
was no one but you. I wanted to be with you--at the last."

His quavering voice broke off in a gust of weeping, and his face frankly
surrendered itself to the distortions of a crying child's countenance,
wide-mouthed and tragically grotesque in its abandonment of control.

Sister Soulsby, as her husband's boots were heard descending the stairs,
rose, and drew the robe up to half cover his ag