ng but the restless moving of the air, which
merely emphasized her loneliness, then she caught the pulsation of
slow regular breathing.

She started to her feet.

She snatched up the lantern and quickly mounted to the bier. She
looked sharply down into the dead face.

Silent, with its white hair, and worn lines, it rested on its white
pillows.

No sound came from the cold still lips.

Yet, while her eyes were riveted on them, once more the longed-for
voice breathed her name. "Margaret!"

It came from behind her.

She turned quickly.

There in the moonlit doorway, with a sad, compassionate smile on his
strong, young face--as if it were yesterday they had parted--stood the
man she remembered so well.

Her bewildered eyes turned from the silent, unfamiliar face among the
satin cushions, to the living face in the moonlight,--the young, brown
eyes, the short, brown hair falling forward over the left temple, the
erect, elastic figure, the strong loving hands stretching out to her.

She was so tired, so heart sick, so full of longing for the love she
had lost.

"Felix," she sobbed, and, blindly groping to reach what she feared
was a hallucination, she stumbled down the steps, and was caught up in
the arms flung wide to catch her, and which folded about her as if
forever. She sighed his name again, upon the passionate young lips
which had inherited the great love she had put aside so long before.

* * * * *

As the last words died away, the Critic drew himself up and laughed.

He had told the story very dramatically, reading the letter from the
envelope he had called a "property," and he had told it well.

The laugh broke the spell, and the Doctor echoed it heartily.

"All right, old man," said the Critic, "you owed me that laugh. You're
welcome."

"I was only thinking," said the Doctor, his face still on a broad
grin, "that we have always thought you ought to have been a novelist,
and now we know at last just what kind of a novelist you would have
been."

"Don't you believe it," said the Critic, "That was only
improvisatore--that's no sample."

"Ho, ho! I'll bet you anything that the manuscript is up in your
trunk, and that you have been committing it to memory ever since this
idea was proposed," said the Doctor, still laughing.

"No, _that_ I deny," replied the Critic, "but as I am no _poseur_, I
will own that I wrote it years ago, and rewrote it so often that I
never