at the lanterns of masked men.  Then it struck him as probable that Mrs. Melville’s sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the door like a hammer.  The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an amusing setting for Ellen’s quaintness, now seemed like a malignant hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons convulsed by human passion.  But presently he heard the crazy staircase creak under somebody’s feet, and the next moment Ellen’s face looked out at him.  She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a crack.  “Oh, Richard!  It’s lovely to see you, but you mustn’t come in.  They’ve taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria.”

“Diphtheria!” he exclaimed.  “That’s rum!  It flashed through my mind as I knocked that it was diphtheria she had.”

“Isn’t that curious!” she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with wonder.  But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd again.  “Of course that’s all nonsense.  What more likely for you to think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?” Seeing that in her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the staircase.  “Oh, you mustn’t, you mustn’t!” she cried under his kisses.  “Do you not know it’s catching?  I may have it on me now.”

“Oh, God, I hope you haven’t, you precious thing....”

“I don’t expect so.  I’ve had an anti-diphtheritic serum injected.  Science is a wonderful thing.  But you might get it.”

“That be damned.”

“Och, you great swearing thing!” she crooned delightedly, and nuzzled into his chest.  “Ah, how I like you to like kissing me!” she whispered in a woman’s voice.  “More than I like it myself.  Is that not strange?” Then her face puckered and she was young again, hardly less young than any new-born thing “It’s a mild case, the doctor said, but it hurt her so!  And oh, Richard, when the ambulance man carried her away she looked so wee!”

“Why did you let her go?” he asked with sudden impatience.  He loved her so much that her swimming eyes turned a knife in his heart, and his maleness resented the pain her female sensitiveness was bringing on him, and wanted to prove that all this could have been avoided by the use of the male attribute of common sense, and therefore she deserved no sympathy at all.  “I would have stood you nurses.  I’m one of the family now.  You might have let me do that!”