gray horizon. "Do you remember that night, Mr. Hamil?"

"Yes."

"Did you ever become friends again?"

"No.... I think he meant to be.... The fault was probably mine. I
misunderstood."

She said: "I know he cared a great deal for you."

The man was silent.

She turned directly toward him, pale, clear-eyed, and in the poise of
her head a faint touch of pride.

"Please do not misunderstand his friendship for me, then. If you were
his friend I would not need to say this. He was very kind to me, Mr.
Hamil."

"I do not doubt it," said Hamil gravely.

"And you do not mistake, what I say?"

He looked her in the eyes, curious--and, in a moment, convinced.

"No," he said gently.... And, offering his hand: "Men are very ignorant
concerning one another. Women are wiser, I think."

He took the slender black-gloved hand in his.

"Can I be of the least use to you?" he asked.

"You have been," she sighed, "if what I said has taught you to know him
a little better."

* * * * *

A week later when the curtain fell on the second act of the new musical
comedy, "The Inca," critics preparing to leave questioned each other
with considerable curiosity concerning this newcomer, Dorothy Wilming,
who had sung so intelligently and made so much out of a subordinate
part.

Nobody seemed to know very much about her; several nice-looking young
girls and exceedingly respectable young men sent her flowers. Afterward
they gathered at the stage entrance, evidently expecting to meet and
congratulate her; but she had slipped away. And while they hunted high
and low, and the last figurante had trotted off under the lamp-lights,
Dolly lay in her own dark room, face among the pillows, sobbing her
heart out for a dead man who had been kind to her for nothing.

* * * * *

And, at the same hour, across an ocean, another woman awoke to take up
the ravelled threadings of her life again and, through another day,
remember Louis Malcourt and all that he had left undone for kindness'
sake.

There were others, too, who were not likely to forget him, particularly
those who had received, with some astonishment, a legacy apiece of one
small Chinese gilded idol--images all of the _Pa-hsien_ or of
_Kwan-Yin_, who rescues souls from hell with the mystic lotus-prayer,
"_Om mane padme hum_."

But the true Catholicism, which perplexed the eighteen legatees lay in
the paradox of the Mohammed