hile I am about
it I'll go to Park Avenue. Any message?"

"None."

"Make it briefer. Besides, look here. I'll wager a wilderness of pippins
that Park Avenue was not and never thought of being engaged to what's
his name. I'll wager because it is not in the picture. Do you hear me?"

"I hear you."

"You are very gifted. Nothing wrong with your tongue, though, is there?"

"Nothing whatever."

"Behold then the messenger awaiting the message."

"Very good. I'm through. Absolutely, completely, entirely. If you must
be a busybody say that. I'm through."

But that was not Jones' idea of the game and he out with it. "I'll do
nothing of the kind."

"Won't you?" Lennox retorted. He had remained seated. But rising then,
he looked at the keeper, motioned at Jones.

"If that man asks for me again, say I'm out."

Jones laughed. "Wow-wow, old cock! I wish I could have said that but I
probably shall. Meanwhile book this: Dinner to-morrow, Athenaeum at
eight. By-bye. Remember Cervantes. Don't forget Verlaine. Sweet dreams."

Lennox sat down, looked at the key, tried to turn it. That door too was
barred.

XXXIII

The offices of Dunwoodie, Bramwell, Strawbridge and Cohen were supplied
with a rotunda in which Jones sat waiting, and Jones loved to sit and
wait.

Since the musician's tenement had crumbled and the soul of the violinist
had gone forth, gone to the unseen assessors who pityingly, with
indulgent hands, weigh our stupid sins, since then a week had passed.
During it, a paper signed by the dead had been admitted by the living, a
prisoner had been discharged and for no other imaginable reason than
because he had killed nobody, Lennox became a hero.

New York is very forgetful. Lennox sank back into the blank anonymity to
which humanity in the aggregate is eternally condemned and from which,
at a bound, he had leaped. The papers were to tell of him again, but
casually, without scareheads, among the yesterdays and aviators in
France. That though was later.

Meanwhile an enigma remained. Very heroically a young man had done
nothing. Hurrah and good-bye! The calciums of curiosity turned on an
obscure fiddler who, after murdering another young man, had succeeded in
bilking the chair.

But why had he killed him? That was the enigma, one which would have
been exciting, if the solution had not been so prompt and so tame. At
the proceedings which resulted in Lennox' discharge, it was testified
that Angelo Cara