“Look here, Vyse—I’m not sorry—not altogether sorry this has happened!” He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm on Vyse’s shoulder. “In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I’m not sure it wasn’t too good for success—but anyhow, I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least have got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought it was because the thing was so good that I kept it back, that I felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority. I swear to you it wasn’t that—I clean forgot it. And one day when I came home it was gone: you’d sent and taken it. And I’ve always thought since you might have owed me a grudge—and not unjustly; so this ... this business of the letters ... the sympathy you’ve shown ... for I suppose it is sympathy ... ?”

Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.

“It’s not sympathy?” broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of his voice. He withdrew his hand from Vyse’s shoulder. “What is it, then? The joy of uncovering my nakedness? An eye for an eye? Is it that?”

Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a heap all the letters he had sorted.

“I’m stone broke, and wanted to keep my job—that’s what it is,” he said wearily ...

THE LEGEND

THE LEGEND

I

ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades’ must be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn’t imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused pattern of the century’s intellectual life, to fit the stranger in anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years earlier, had been left by Pellerin’s unaccountable disappearance; and conversely, such a man as the Wades’ visitor couldn’t have lived for sixty years without filling, somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent void.

At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother that Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose chief charms in the young man’s eyes was that they remained so robustly untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor Wade’s younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently flourishing high-priests.