his only capital puts five of them in a sweep where the
odds are a thousand to one.

And then Fortune, who for more than forty years had pretended she did
not know that there was any such person as Hugh Kinross cumbering the
globe, suddenly veered round and smiled one of her most gracious smiles
upon him.

He fairly leapt into fame. The inscrutable reading world, long bored
almost to death by a sameness of methods, actually rose up and waved its
hat at this savage treatment, and demanded that he should continue so to
deal with it.

So Hugh, marvelling more than any one, continued to "lay about him with
a knotted stick" as Kate, who had long typed his stories unsuccessful
and successful, expressed it.

And he found himself wealthy, or at least comfortable, beyond the hopes
of his most avaricious days, and famous beyond the wildest dreams that
had flamed up in him when he had read his first journalese in print.

Even at forty-nine he had made no close ties. One sister, Mrs. Gowan,
was married to a somewhat consequential brewer, who in the journalistic
days had rather patronized Hugh. So there was no corner in that home the
author cared to accept for his own.

The other sister, Kate--

"Fair, fat and fortiter in re,
And suave in manner"--

had long since refused the brewer's patronage and pompous proposal that
she should make a home in his house, and in return act as governess to
his children. She had thrown in her lot with Hugh, and was soon making,
as a typewriter who could be relied upon for faithful work, a very
comfortable income. The brother and sister boarded generally at the same
house, and, absorbed in their work, drifted over the borderland of
middle age together, and together lost their respective waist lines.
They were the best of chums and respected each other's weaknesses. It
was rather a trial to Hugh, perhaps, that Kate, being fat, had taken
ardently to the bicycle and was therefore a joke among onlookers. But
seeing the extreme enjoyment she got from her machine, and recognizing
that a healthy, hardworking woman, without home or children, must break
out somewhere, he had never tried to make her desist from her pleasure.

And Kate had to bear with Hugh.

He had a maddening habit of casting forth the match with which he
lighted his pipe.

He would sit at a table surrounded with match-holders of every
variety--one Christmas Kate had put six of the latest novelties in this
line in his s