key-holes and write them up. If he ever puts me into one of his
books I'll waylay him at night and amputate his writing-hand."

"He won't," said the Professor. "I asked him once why he didn't, and
he said you'd never do in one of his books, because you don't belong
to real life at all. He thinks you are some new experiment of an
enterprising Providence, and he doesn't want to use you until he sees
how you turn out."

"He could put me down as I go," suggested the Doctor.

"That's so," replied the other. "I told him so, but he said he had
no desire to write a lot of burlesque sketches containing no coherent
idea."

"Oh, he said that, did he?" observed the Doctor, with a smile.
"Well--wait till Stuart Harley comes to me for a prescription. I'll
get even with him. I'll give him a pill, and he'll disappear--for
ten days."

Whether it was as Kelly said or not, that Harley went into a trance
and poked his nose into the private life of the people he wrote
about, it was a fact that while meditating upon the possible output
of his pen our author was as deaf to his surroundings as though he
had departed into another world, and it rarely happened that his mind
emerged from that condition without bringing along with it something
of value to him in his work.

So it was upon this May morning. For an hour or two Harley lay
quiescent, apparently gazing out of his flat window over the