A sparkling essence of tears and jest, of romance and passion and war and grotesquerie, of treachery and irony and blood and death, whose temper no man may know until he tests it through the alchemy of his brain and soul!" To Starrett it gave a heavy courtesy; to Payson a mad buffoonery; to Wherry pathos; to Carl himself--ah!--there was the rub! To Carl its message was as capricious as the wind--a moon-mad chameleon changing its color with the fickle light.

And in the bottle to-night lay a fierce, unreasoning resentment against Diane.
"Fool!" said Carl.

"One mad, eloquent lie of love and she would have softened.

Women are all like that.

Tell me," Carl stared whimsically into his glass as if it were a magic crystal of revelation, "why is it that when I am scrupulously honest no one understands?
.