"It's no one we know, a lanna. No one at all."

"But he called, 'Reynardine!'"

"You only think so, dark childeen, you trembling there and standing by your mother's grave. A trick your mind played you, machree dheelish. He was no one you know, or nothing to you. strange man was it, a strange bad man."

Only a

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

I

T must be for the thousandth time now he was

sitting down at the neat table looking out on the little lawn, and trying to get his ideas together, trying to get something new, something startling, that would awaken these hard-boiled men who had control of theaters, magazines, publishing houses to the sense that he was alive, worth while, valuable. If he could only think up a new detective, or—or something.

Any other than he would have given up the game long ago, but he knew he had talent-he would n't go quite so far as to say genius, but great talent. It was no use their turning him down all the time. He was certain they never read the stuff.

He was certain, too, there was some trick, some knack he had n't discovered. Just some little trick. These men of national, international fame-he could see from their faces they had no especial brains, any more than he had.

But just some little trick he could n't get.

He had taken courses in writing, gone to schools

of journalism, and here were all his manuscripts with neat rejection slips; here was what he thought the great American novel battered and dog-eared, a study of the temptations of a girl in the great city; and here was his crook drama, that some filthy reader had marked with the rim of a coffee cup. It was enough to make a man quit.

But he would n't quit. He'd be as big as the biggest of them. He, too, would have his pictures in the papers, not gaunt and bitter as most of them seemed, but pleasant, dignified, literary. And his picture would look like an author's, with its wellmarked features, its masculine little mustache, its intellectual glasses. And he, too, would be interviewed. And he, too, would sign contracts involving great sums of money. And there would be gossip about him, too, in the papers, where in Florida he was spending the winter vacation, what he was doing in summer.

He would n't quit. Had n't they all said at school and college he was cut out to be a writer? Had n't he gone to Europe for six months? And, what was more, had n't he the money his father, the hardware man, had left him? Had n't he his home? He could stick it out.

His home! His wife! If instead of these few trees, this lawn, the outlook of the quiet sound, if instead of here he lived somewhere in the welter of affairs, would n't he be better? Somewhere things

changed, where one did not have to go three quarters of an hour in a train to the theater. Down town in New York. Only trees and grass and water and sky here. Nothing to write about. And his wife, Berenice-oh, she was a sweet girl, a nice girl, but hadn't he perhaps made a mistake? She was so good and wholesome! Too much? Would n't it have been better to be married toto an actress, or a sculptress, or-or something. Some one who could feel things; who would n't smile, and be nice. Berenice was all right, but—

And his mother. She was a nice, darling person, but she did n't just understand. She was just a mother, like anybody's mother: If she could feel the great complex things! But she was just loving, and everything he did was right.

water

noth

Berenice, and his mother . . . the trees, the essential barrenness of life ing to write about . . . so unfair.

II

Because Barry had hinted it annoyed him to have her in the house while he was trying to write, Berenice had decided to go out for an hour or so, to give the poor lad a chance. And for a few minutes it bothered her to be idling, whereas there were so many little things that needed her attention. A house became so weary. It needed a flick of

the hand here and there, a touch to flowers. But the white road, and the arching blue-green trees, and the drift of the dogwood-a cloud, not a flower, did it seem, so delicately balanced was it in the May air-all these took her eyes, and the immense miracle of spring drew her thoughts from the gracious artifice of the house. How gently, how imperceptibly it came, a little curling wave of the west wind, and the clearly pitched note of an adventuring bird! It was like the moon, spring was; a clear thin line of silver in the gray sky, like the minute green of the waking willow-tree, and it grew under your eyes was its sweet benevolence. And it was hard to go to sleep at night, so much was being accomplished, for fear you would miss some phase of the return of beauty. Oh, the little birds . . . so fussy, so intense about their nests. The showers like great sheets of silver; and after each the slim trees were more like pretty ladies, and the great thick trees like pleasant stalwart men. And the flowers came shyly, demurely, just as young girls might come; just as she herself, Berenice, felt, acted when she was fifteen, and was brought into a roomful of strange people.

And she stopped for an instant at the dark pool where the little turtles were busy, swimming to and fro, a clear-cut, fine line on the dusky water, a minute head with crystalline beads of eyes, just showing... and if they thought you were watch