lse
led to execution.

"I must get it out of my system," he explained half apologetically to
himself as he began the writing of a novel. To this task, as to
everything else he had undertaken, he brought the entire concentration
of his mind and energy, until the book soon began to seem real to
him--more real than anything he had done. As he was copying the last
page for the last time, Fletcher sailed into the harbor for a week of
farewell before returning to New York.

"What have you been doing for amusement these last six months,
Dunne?" he asked as he dropped into David's house.

"You'd never guess," said David, "what your absence drove me to. I've
written a book--a novel."

"Let me take it back to the hotel with me to-night. I haven't been
sleeping well lately, and it may--"

"If it serves as a soporific," said David gravely, as he handed him
the bulky package, "my labor will not have been in vain."

The next morning Wilder came again into David's office.

"I fear you didn't sleep well, after all," observed David, looking at
his visitor's heavy-lidded eyes.

"No, darn you, Dunne. I took up your manuscript and I never laid it
down until the first streaks of dawn. Then when I went to bed I lay
awake thinking it all over. Why, Dunne, it's the best book I ever
read!"

"I wish," David replied with a whimsical smile, "that you were a
publisher."

"Speaking of publishers, that's why I didn't bring the manuscript
back. I sail in a week, and I want you to let me take it to a
publisher I know in New York. He will give it a prompt reading."

"If it wouldn't bother you too much, I wish you would. You see, it
would take so long for it to come back here and be sent out again each
time it is rejected."

"Rejected!" scoffed Wilder. "You wait and see! Aren't you going to
dedicate it?"

David hesitated, his eyes stealing dreamily out across the bay to the
horizon line.

"I wonder," he said meditatively, "if the person to whom it is
dedicated--every word of it--wouldn't know without the inscription."

"No," objected Fletcher, "you should have it appear out of compliment."

He smiled as he wrote on a piece of paper: "To T. L. P."

"The initials of your sweetheart?" quizzed Fletcher.

"No; when I was a little chap I used to spin yarns. These are the
initials of one who was my most absorbed listener."

Wilder raised anchor and sailed back to the states. At the expiration
of two months he wrote David that his book