"Oh, do not leave me," she cried, "or my love will kill me!"

He bent eagerly above her. "Say it again--convince me!"

"I love you," she cried, again and again and again, with such an anguish
of sincerity as would convince the most skeptical spook that ever
revisited the glimpses of the moon.

"You will forget again," he said.

"I shall never forget!" she cried. "My life will henceforth be one
continual remembrance of you, one long act of devotion to your memory,
one oblation, one unceasing penitence, one agony of waiting!"

He lifted her face, and saw that it was true.

"Well," said he, gracefully wrapping his cloak about him, "well, now I
shall have a little peace."

He kissed her, with a certain jaunty grace, upon her hair, and prepared
to dissolve, while he lightly tapped a tattoo upon his leg with the
dove-colored gloves he carried.

"Good-by, my dear!" he said; "henceforth I shall sleep o' nights; my
heart is quite at rest."

"But mine is breaking," she wailed, madly trying once more to clasp his
vanishing form.

He threw her a kiss from his misty finger-tips, and all that remained
with her, besides her broken heart, was a faint disturbance of the air.

THE END

Transcriber's Notes:

Page 25--Possible typo, but left it as the original. "...and contented
himself, as a rule, with creeping about the passages in =list=
slippers,..."

Page 25--arquebuse--printer typo corrected to arquebus.

Page 231--setting--printer typo corrected to sitting.

Page 255--missing word "have" inserted to: "But now I'll none of you,
for you've played with me."

Page 304--Potential typo. "...walkin' round an' round the graveyard
=lie= a six days' race fer the belt at Madison Square."

Page 325--inpatient--typo corrected to impatient. Although inpatient is
a valid word, it is incorrectly used in this instance.

Page 345--is--printer typo corrected to in.

Page 408--Possible typo, but left it as in the original. "...then the
=affection= spread to her knees and gradually extended upward."

Several instances of variant spelling of reci-pe and recipe. Left as in
the original.

From
A Southern Porch

By

Dorothy Scarborough

_A Book of Whimsy_

The author does not preach the lost art of loafing. No! Nothing so
direct as preaching. She merely loafs,--consistently, restfully,
delightfully, but with an almost fatal hypnotic persuasiveness. She is a
sort of stationary Pied Piper, luring the unwary re