"Oh, damn my career!"

"You came near damning it yourself, Maurice. What possessed you to camp in a snowdrift after singing?"

"I was enjoying a view of my cage from the outside. Bars look so much prettier from without than from within."

Denys eyed his friend curiously; looked away, resolved to mind his own business; looked back again, and spoke.

"What is the matter, boy? You've been out of sorts for a month."

"Can't you let a poor singer have even a grouch in peace?"

"I can't understand the wherefore of it. You 're making fifty thousand a year; you 're the idol of the hour-"

"I suppose you mean the letters I never read, from women I never heard of."

"That's your loss. A look at them would cure Hamlet's melancholy."

"Not if they were written to him. They make me sick."

"I'm going to publish a book some day," Denys mused. "The Matinée Girl's Complete Letter-Writer and Hero-Worshiper's Guide.' There was one note, yesterday, beginning: 'I could not write to you, a

stranger, did I not feel that so beautiful a face-""

"Shut up, you ass!"

"I'm not composing it. It was in your mail yesterday. that so beautiful a face must be the symbol of a beautiful soul-’”

A sofa-pillow took him full in the mouth, thence to fall on his glass and break it.

"You 're not cut, Denys? No, I see it is n't cut glass," Tolna answered himself, as he bent to pick up the fragments. But Alden cried out with his never-sleeping anxiety:

"Maurice, don't touch it! Ring for François."

With a groan of disgust, the tenor flung himself down on the divan, his face against the wall. François, coming in, was bidden to clear away the breakage. His master rolled over, fixing the valet with a solemn eye.

"François, what dost think of a pretended friend, a traitor, who makes himself to cut the throat of his unsuspecting comrade, his brother of the heart, with a piece of glass?"

The valet looked bewildered. "But monsieur is not hurt?"

Maurice clutched the man's wrist. His voice was intense, his eyes glittered.

"No, not to-night. To-night, seest thou, I

foiled him. to kill me.

But for this long time he seeks Inch by inch, day by day, for a long, long time. He sucks out my life as a vampire sucks blood. Understandest thou?"

It was evident that François was far from understanding. Held in Maurice's tight grip, he glanced at "Monsieur Aldanne," frightened, incredulous, suspicious, altogether puzzled. His eyes, slinking away from the indignant glance they encountered, fell again on his master's tense face.

"Monsieur," he stammered-"monsieur, it seems impossible."

"Monsieur jests," Denys interrupted sharply. "Go!”

François obeying with all alacrity, Denys broke into unwilling laughter.

"How old are you, Maurice? Ten? For a minute that fool believed you."

The tenor sat up, smoothing back the straggling hair that had lent so much to his dramatic effect.

"Ha! ha! scoffer, am I then great? You always say that I can't act. You see for yourself that I can, only your rotten operas don't give my genius any scope."

"I'll let Weber and Fields have you."

"Do! That's just in my line. I'd sing 'em Jeames's song:

"R. Hangeline, R. Lady Mine,

Dost thou rem-e-em-ber Jeames?"

till there was n't a dry eye in the house. No, I would n't, though; I 'm sick of the footlights."

"I wish you 'd confide in your anxious manager. What is the matter with you? It is n't overwork, that I 'll swear. And it is n't nerves, for I 've known you fourteen years, and you have n't any. As far as I can see, everything is lovely and the goose hangs high. I can only conclude that you 're in love."

Maurice ejaculated a sound between a laugh and a snort.

"In love? Me?" "Yes, you."

"Gad! I wish I was. But where under the canopy do I meet anybody to fall in love with?"

"Well, I have suspected it was Arnheim." Maurice groaned. "Arnheim?

Arn-?

Great Scott! man, she 's an opera-singer.'

"Does that make you immune?"

"Might n't some Johnnies, perhaps," he

conceded doubtfully. "I'd as soon cherish a tender passion for that andiron. Lord, how I hate everything that has to do with the life!" "You have been in the life, studying and performing, for eight years. I never heard you say a word against it before. If it is n't a woman that has upset you, then what the deuce is it?"

Maurice, looking down into the fire, smiled a tender smile, such as the sweetheart he denied might well have been happy to inspire. "Don't you really know what it is, Denys? It's New York."

His comrade looked blank.

Maurice amplified. "Little old New York, where I was born. I was all right till you brought me here. Over there, I did n't mind the confinement. There was nothing to be confined from-"

"Paris, Rome, Vienna, nothing? O ye gods!"

"Well, I suppose I am the only good American who does n't want to go to Paris when he dies. I might like it if I had seen it first as a man. But it's no place for a boy. And what an awfully forlorn youngster I was! I had just lost father and mother and two setter puppies. Besides, the grocer from Sixth