said, 'Will you kiss me, Edith?' and afterward he said, 'My wife!' and
that was his last word. But we shall meet again!"




KEN'S MYSTERY.


One cool October evening--it was the last day of the month, and
unusually cool for the time of year--I made up my mind to go and spend
an hour or two with my friend Keningale. Keningale was an artist (as
well as a musical amateur and poet), and had a very delightful studio
built onto his house, in which he was wont to sit of an evening. The
studio had a cavernous fire-place, designed in imitation of the old-
fashioned fire-places of Elizabethan manor-houses, and in it, when the
temperature out-doors warranted, he would build up a cheerful fire of
dry logs. It would suit me particularly well, I thought, to go and have
a quiet pipe and chat in front of that fire with my friend.

I had not had such a chat for a very long time--not, in fact, since
Keningale (or Ken, as his friends called him) had returned from his
visit to Europe the year before. He went abroad, as he affirmed at the
time, "for purposes of study," whereat we all smiled, for Ken, so far
as we knew him, was more likely to do anything else than to study. He
was a young fellow of buoyant temperament, lively and social in his
habits, of a brilliant and versatile mind, and possessing an income of
twelve or fifteen thousand dollars a year; he could sing, play,
scribble, and paint very cleverly, and some of his heads and figure-
pieces were really well done, considering that he never had any regular