A voice said in her ear, “Can you stand?” And she knew she was on the steps.  She heard the bell ring, but before her mother could catch her in her arms as she fell, she heard the carriage door bang, and he was gone forever.

All that night she lay and tossed and wept and raved, and longed in her fever to die.

And all night, he walked the streets marvelling at himself, at Nature, and at Civilization, between which he had so disastrously fallen, and wondering to how many men the irremediable had ever happened before.

And the next morning, early, messengers were flying about with notices of the bride’s illness.—­Miss Moreland’s wedding was deferred by brain fever.

When she recovered, her hair was white, and she had lost all taste for matrimony, but she had found instead that desire for anything rather than personal existence, which made her the ardent, self-abnegating worker for the welfare of the downtrodden that the world knew her.

* * * * *

There was a moment of surprised silence.

Some one coughed.  No one laughed.  Then the Journalist, always ready to leap into a breach, gasped:  “Horrible!”

“Getting to be a pet word of yours,” said the Lawyer.

The Violinist tried to save the situation by saying gently:  “Well, I don’t know.  It is the commonest of all situations in a melodrama.  So why fuss?”

The Trained Nurse shrugged her shoulders.  “I know that story,” she said.

“You do not,” snapped the Lawyer.  “You may know a story, but you never heard that one.”

“All right,” she admitted.  “I am not going to add footnotes, don’t be alarmed.”

“You don’t mean to say that is a true story?” ejaculated the Divorcee.

“As for me,” said the Critic, “I don’t believe it.”

“No one asked you to,” replied the Lawyer.  “It is only another case of the Doctor’s pet theory—­that whatever the mind of mortal mind can conceive, can come to pass.”

“I suppose also that it is a proof of another of his pet theories.  Scratch civilized man, and you find the beast.”

The Doctor was lying back in his chair.  He never said a word.  Somehow the story seemed a less suggestive topic of conversation than usual.

“The weather is going to change,” said the Doctor.  “There’s rain in the air.”

“Well, anyway,” said the Journalist, as we gathered up our belongings and prepared to shut up for the night, “the Youngster’s ghost story was a good night cap compared to that.”

“Not a bit of it,” said the Critic.  “There’s the foundation of a bully melodrama in that story, and I’m not sure that it isn’t the best one yet—­so full of reserves.”

“No imagination, all the same,” answered the Critic.  “As realistic in subject, if not in treatment, as Zola.”

“Now give us some shop jargon,” laughed the Lawyer.  “You’ve not really treated us to a true touch of your methods yet.”