the dimness. A little hot ripple had run over him. "Not on
your life, Chum!" he said. "No shameless barter! There must be other
things besides money and social position in this doddering old world,
after all!"

The dog whined with delight at the voice and jumped up to lick the
strong tense hand held down to him. "Do you know, old chap," his master
continued, "I've been handing myself a collection of cold marble truths
in the last few weeks? I've been the prize dolt of the whole show, and
you ought to have thrown me over long ago. You've probably realized it
all along, but it has never dawned on me until lately. I've worn the
blue ribbon so long I'd come to think it was a decoration. All my life
I've been just another of those well-meaning, brainless young idiots who
have never done a blessed thing that's the slightest value to anybody
else. Well, Chum, we're through. We're going to begin doing something
for ourselves, if it's only raising cabbages! And we're going to stand
it without any baby-aching--the nurse never held our noses when we took
our castor-oil!"

It was folded down, that old bright page. _Finis_ had been written to
the rose-colored chapter. And even as he told himself, he was conscious
of a new rugged something that had been slowly dawning within him, a
sense of courage, even of zest, and a furious hatred of the self-pity
that had wrenched him even for a moment.

He turned from the window, picked up his letters, and followed by the
dog, went slowly up another flight to his room.

CHAPTER V

THE LETTER

He tore open the letters abstractedly: the usual dinner-card or
two, a tailor's spring announcement, a chronic serial from an
exclamatory marble-quarrying company, a quarterly statement of a
club house-committee. The last two missives bore a nondescript look.

One was small, with the name of a legal firm in its corner. The other
was largish, corpulent and heavy, of stout Manila paper, and bore, down
one side, a gaudy procession of postage stamps proclaiming that it had
been registered.

"What's in that, I wonder?" he said to himself, and then, with a smile
at the unmasculine speculation, opened the smaller envelope.

"Dear Sir," began the letter, in the most uncompromisingly conventional
of typewriting:

"_Dear Sir_:

"Enclosed please find, with title-deed, a memorandum opened in
your name by the late John Valiant some years before his death.
It was his desire that