he delightful affair was over, and Molly, feeling
immensely happy in spite of her anxious heart, had been escorted to
Queen's. Professor Edwin Green, hastening into his room, flung his hat
in one direction and his coat in another, and sat down at his desk.
Without an instant's hesitation, he seized a pencil and the first scrap
of paper he found and began to write:

"Dear Richard:

"I know that your cares are many, but get to work on the score
of the opera. I find that by working at night for a week I shall
be able to finish the last act and make all the changes you
suggested. We must launch the thing now. I have overcome all
scruples, as you called them, and I want nothing more than to
get the opera into some manager's hands. If you think that Blum
& Starks will take it up, you had better see them at once. My
name may be used and everything that goes with it in the way of
previous unimportant literary efforts. It's unusual, of course,
for a Professor of English Literature to write a comic opera,
but the very unusualness may give it some publicity and help the
thing along. I have made one change without conferring; given
the tenor-lover the baritone-villain's song: 'Eyes like the
skies in summer.' Write something very pretty for that, will
you, old man? The money we may make on this will help some in
the present critical family situation. I understand that there
have been a good many failures in light opera this winter, and
the managers are looking for good things. It may be that we
shall strike at the psychological moment.

"Yours, E. G."

The august Professor then wrote two other letters; one to a firm of
bankers and one to his publishers. At last, getting into an old dressing
gown and some very rusty slippers, lighting a long, black cigar and
drawing his student's lamp nearer, he took an immense roll of manuscript
from a drawer and fell to work. It was three o'clock before he turned in
for three hours of troubled sleep.

CHAPTER VIII.

A JAPANESE SPREAD.

One morning every girl at Queen's discovered by her plate at the
breakfast table a strange rice paper document some twelve inches in
length and very narrow as to width, rolled compactly on a small stick.

"What's this?" demanded Margaret Wakefield, unrolling her scroll and
regarding it with the legal eye of an attorney perusing documentary
evidence.

Acro