ve note, accompanied by
the less well-known sister-call of warning and distress.

The truth is that Eustace was becoming harder to manage with each
recurring crisis. For testimony in the present instance, I need only
adduce that he wrote poetry, more or less, after meeting Miss Lansdale
but a scant half-dozen times. This came to me in confidence, however,
and the obliquity of it spread no farther beyond the family lines.

Fluttering with alarm, the mother of Eustace approached me as one
presumably familiar with the power of the Lansdales to work disaster in
a peaceful and orderly family. She sought to know if I could not prevent
her boy from "making a fool of himself." It was never her way to bother
with many words when she knew the right few.

With an air that signified her intention of letting me know the worst at
once, Mrs. Eubanks drew from her bead reticule a sheet of paper
scribbled over in the handwriting of her misguided offspring. It was a
rondeau; I knew that by the shape, and the mother apologized for the
indelicacy of it before permitting my own cheeks to blush thereat. The
dominant line of the composition I saw to be--

"When love lights night to be its day."

I turned from the stricken mother to cough deprecatingly when I had
read. She likewise had the delicacy to turn away and cough. But an
emergency of this momentous import must be discussed in plain terms,
however disconcerting the details, and Mrs. Eubanks had nerved herself
for the ordeal.

"I can't think," she began, "where the boy _learned_ such things!"

I had not the courage to tell her that they might be entirely
self-taught under certain circumstances.

"Such shameless, brazen things!" she persisted. "We have always been
_so_ careful of Euty--striving to keep him--well, wholesome and pure,
you understand, Major Blake."

"There are always dangers," I said, but only because she had stopped
speaking, and not in any hope of instructing her.

"If only we can keep him from making a fool of himself--"

"It seems rather late," I said, this time with profound conviction. "See
there!"

Upon the margin of that captured sheet Eustace had exposed, as it were,
the very secret mechanics of his passion. There were written tentative
rhymes, one under another, as "Kate--mate--Fate--late"--and eke an
unblushing "sate." Also had he, in the frenzy of his poetic rapture,
divined and indicated the technical affinities existing among words like
"bliss