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he wanted so passionately He should be happy. Why wasn’t he?

Why wasn’t he?

“Because it is a vile thing to do, James Harley,” he answered himself aloud. “You have cast off the little woman who has been unswervingly faithful to you—the woman whose every desire has been for your happiness—the woman who has made you what you are; who made you ‘James Harley, author of this, that, and the other,’—who put you on the literary map. Where would you have been without her?—you, with plenty of language and not a damn plot in the whole of your miserable carcase? Where are you going to be now that you have ditched her? Ass! Idiot! There are not enough epithets in the language to adequately describe you! What is the matter with you? Throwing away a wife and child, a career, a home, everything! For whom? For a woman of whom the whole town speaks uncleanly! For a—a—Oh, hell!”

A doctor, strolling across the footpath to his car after paying a professional visit, failed to recognise James Harley, the gifted writer of scented romances in many journals, in the man who hurried past with hands thrust deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched, hair long and untidy, clothes hanging baggily upon him, and who talked loudly to himself.

The James Harley whom the doctor knew—the man with whom the doctor had played bridge only six weeks since—was a tall man with a fine breadth of shoulder and a deep chest; a man with an easy carriage and a refined taste in clothes; a handsome man whom the gods had designed in the mould of a hero and to whom they had given the gift of tongues; a man destined to go far in his career as a writer of love-stories, but who could whack a golf-ball and put the gloves on with any man in the district.

“Great fellow, Harley!” was the doctor’s way of describing him to his acquaintances. “Heaven alone