You Never Know Your Luck, Complete

He was the sport of a consuming restlessness. His brain would not be still. He could not discharge from it the thoughts of the day and make it vacuou

sions which stormed down the path of the night, dragging him a

e. He had had a sure thing then, and it was whisked away just when it would have enabled him to pass the crisis of his life. Wife, home, the old fascinating, crowded life-they had all vanished because of that vile trick of destiny; and ever since then he had been wandering in the wild

t, soaring, that every avenue of credit seemed closed; that neither bank nor money-lender, trust nor loan company, would let him have the ten thousand dollars necessary for him to hold his place in the syndicate; while each of the other members of the clique had flatly and cheerfully refused, saying they were

ays to cash or credit. They're laying to do you out of your share. Unless you put up the cash

une for a song while the patentee died in the poor-house. Yet that four days was time enough for a live man to do a "flurry of

and disasters dogged his footsteps; and behind them all, floating among the elves and gnomes of ill-luck and disappointment, was a woman's face. It was not his wife's face, not a face that belonged to the old

ings and sayings of J. G. Kerry. His wife and the past had been shadowy in a way, had been as part of a life lived out, which would return in some distant day, but was not vital to the present. Much as he had loved his wife, the violent wrench away from her had seemed almost as complete as death itself; but the resumption of his own name and the telling if his story had produced a complete psychological change in him mentally and bodily. The impersona

rp and terrifying anxiety came to him. If his wife was living! Living? Her death had never been even a remote possibility to his mind, though the parting had ha

e, went to the desk where the unopened letter lay, and took it out. With the feeling that he must destroy this record, this unread but, as he knew, ugly record of their differences, and so clear her memory of any cruelty, of any act of anger, he was about to hold it to the flame

one there?" but he

e mystical. It is hard to tell what he thought as he stood there and peered into the darkness of the other room-the living-room of the house. He was in a state of trance, almost, a victim of the night. But as he closed the door softly the words of

my lad-tell me,

did I speak, ne

beautiful; like a

eaway will I

he lad I loved he

hand in mine, kis

the wind, he will

ereaway goes m

imself, but it was of no avail. Suddenly he remembered the bed of boughs he had made for himself at the place where Kitty had had her meeting with the

to the night. All at once he was conscious of another presence in the room, but the folk-song was still beating in his brain, and he reproved himself for succumbing to fantasy. Finding the front door in the dark,

lf down. Why, here were green boughs under him, not the dried remains of what he had placed there! Kitty-it was Kitty, dear, gay, joyous, various Kitty, who had done this thing, thinking that he might want to sleep in the open again after his illness.

was soft; when he k

laid his cheek war

earth, heaven stoo

ereaway goes

ic warrior of olden days. Delicate, refined, perfectly poised, and Kitty beside her like a sunflower to a sprig of heliotrope! Mona-Kitty, the two names, the two who, so far, had touched his life, each in her own way, as none others had done, they floated before his eyes till sight and

rrow came which belonged to the other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man in whose arms she ever had lain. And the pity and the tragedy of it was that he loved his wife-the catfish wife. The sharp, pitiless instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife. She knew the u

rit of a new-born world finding her way to the place she must call home. It was all so dim, so like clouded silver, the trees and the grass and the bushes and the night. Noiselessly she stole over the grass a

e upward to the skies, his breast rising

she had ever seen it. One hand lay across his chest and one was thrown back over his head with the abandon of perfect rest. Al

to his-the first time that ever in love they had been given to any man. She had the impulse to throw her ar

d in the quick, brok

fled away among the t

the words of unconsciousness, or was it subcon

now, though she felt that the words were meant for another. Yet it was her kiss, h