"And as I have no violent desire," I continued firmly, "to camp beside the prau with Pedro and his mates, I wish, if I may, to acquire a roof-tree of my own. By lease, if possible, by purchase if I must, I would become for a while a householder in Happiness,-if my wish is not disagreeable to any one?"

In Don Feliciano's mind, when he realized that this was my unalterable feeling, contrary emotions contended for a while like weights hung at the arms of a balance. But finally, the pleasure of knowing that I was to be a permanent-forwhatever-time - it might-be fellow fellow citizen overcame the regret that I could not also be his very-welcomefor-as-long-as I-would-honor him guest.

The way in which he contrived to reveal the outcome of this involved hedonistic reaction and to let me know that whatever pleased nie gave him more pleasure still was a lesson in conversational dexterity. When at last it was finished I told him that I was glad to find he agreed with me about my duty. "My Sententiousness," said I. "holds a contrary opinion, as usual. But now we are two to one and a very strong majority, since we are so much the older and wiser two out of the three of us."

"The three of us?" said Don Feliciano. "Your Sententiousness? What is that, please?"

"It's a name I have," said I, controlling my lips with difficulty, as I realized that even to Don Feliciano my poor head seemed hopelessly awry just then, "a name I have for

a sort of embodied spirit that has taken up its residence inside me and spends its time in passing comments on my conduct."

"I see now," said Don Feliciano, visibly relieved. "You mean your conscience."

'Do I?" I asked. "Isn't a conscience something that tells you afterwards when you've done a thing wrong?"

"Some of them," said Don Feliciano dryly, "would answer to that description."

"I thought so," said I. "I've felt that way once or twice myself. But this thing I'm speaking of is quite different. It looks ahead as well as back. It's a spirit of negation through and through. In one of its incarnations, I fancy, it must have been a butterfly collector of the thorough-going, German type. It's just the sort to ruthlessly enjoy catching every airy, errant, fluttering thing to pin its wings out flat and dry them. It's been busy even. as I've been talking with you here. It objects to my remaining in Felicidad, predicting certain complications-"

Don Feliciano had been smiling. All at once he turned grave.

"My dear Don D-jon," he said, rather soberly, "your frankness imposes on me a certain responsibility which I dislike to accept. But being much older than you are, I feel that since you are good enough to attach an interest to my opinions, I ought to remind you of a—not danger so much as possibility-" he hesitated.

"The possibility, in short," said I, smiling, "that after eliminating the unavailable aspirants for Pepita's hand, I may reach the point where I am left-standing in the boots myself?"

"That's one way of putting it," said he. "Though you are no longer a boy, as you have sometimes reminded me, you are not an an

cient man yet. A certain something about you makes me suspect that you might not be wholly unsusceptible to the charms of a woman as attractive as Pepita, if you were thrown much in her company. Are you prepared to run that-risk?"

"At such a suspicion," said I, laughing outright, "I suppose no man of less than ten-score years, Benedict or celibate, ever took deep offense. I will tell you frankly that I have thought of such a possibility. I even went so far, once, as to dream of it. But I woke up! God forbid," I said, "that's ever happening to me. I admire my godchild immensely. As a psychologist, I find her unpredictabilities even fascinating. But in a wife such qualities-why, Dan Feliciano, the girl's a dozen girls. The man who marries her will be worse off than a Mormon, who at least can lodge his dozen separate. God save me from a girl like that! I have had one experience of her tender mercies, and that was quite enough for me. No, Don Feliciano, if I ever marry, it will be with a woman of one idea, and that a mawkish one that I can pooh-pooh to my heart's content; not with a minx like this godchild of mine."

"And yet," said he, "you seem quite ready to deliver over some man and brother to her mercies."

"Oh, yes, indeed," said I, "quite ready, when the time comes. Meanwhile, I'm eager to get settled here in Happiness.'

"There's no reason," said Don Feliciano, "why we shouldn't go out and find a house for you at once. If I can only find my own hat first-"

He turned to me suddenly. "May I ask," said he, "how long this plan of yours has been maturing in your mind?"

"A good two hours, at the very least," "said I. "I'm positive I began

to think of it almost as soon as I woke up."

"I thought so," he said, and smiled at me. "Your future, at present, is quite the most extemporaneous future I ever heard of. But after all," he said, more thoughtfully, "why shouldn't all our futures be extemporaneous? A man's own decent impulses are surely as safe a guide for him as the bloodless wisdom of his neighbor.

"Well," he continued, "I hope we'll find eventually that you've extemporized today a very pleasant future. And now, if I could only find my hat-"

The hat was lying under his nose.

CHAPTER XVII.

House of Forgetfulness.

When Don Feliciano had finally run down his hat, we set out on our larger quest.

It was

my first adventure in house-hunting, a chase which, though I had never tried it, I had supposed was not numbered in the list of sports.

But in Felicidad, where all things are transformed, it was sport of a quiet sort. I could not have asked for two more pleasurable days than those I spent in Don Feliciano's company, prowling about the sunny little town.

It is true that the object of our search eluded us. But there were compensations.

To me, at least, there was an interest almost exciting in the hunt itself; in the unhurried and judicial weighing of the merits and demerits of various sites; in the ever-present feeling that I might be at any instant on discovery's verge. One must have been a wanderer, I think, and homeless for many years, as I had been, to find quite that zest in the mere contemplation of a square of sheltering roof and walls, a few feet of earth, which may be destined for one's own.

And if I could not find my house at once I soon discovered that my companion, who seemed to be proprietor of every second or third dwelling in the town, would take great pleasure in turning the occupants out of any one of them that suited me, and that the occupants would share his pleasure if their home fitted at all my needs and my condition. It was made plain to me that in leaving the shelter of Don Feliciano's roof I was not leaving the boundless hospitality which Felicidad extended to the stranger within her gates.

But in my needs and my condition, as determined by Don Feliciano, lay a difficulty. Of his many houses not one was quite what we were looking for. One was too large and one too small; one too dry and one too damp; all were too sunny or too dark; too solitary or too closely elbowed by their neighbors for one who, though by choice a follower of Noah's ancient trade, was yet obviously, as Don Feliciano assured me many times, of a position, with a certain regard for dignity to be maintained.

Especially, no house we inspected promised to accommodate my servants properly. That objection amused me more than all the others.

"You seem to forget," said I, "that I am a man of the very simplest tastes. Pedro and his fellows, if they have not vanished with the prau-"

"They are camping on the beach," said my host. "They are being "They are being looked out for, and I beseech you not to worry about them."

"I have not been worrying," said I. "But Pedro and his fellows will be all the retainers I shall have need of. And since the five of us have curled up, comfortably enough, night after night, within the confines of our boat, it seems improbable that we cannot find room for ourselves in almost any house."

"My dear Don Djon," said Don Feliciano, "your establishment is certain to expand. To tell the truth, our chief difficulty lies in your bachelorhood. We've never had a bachelor in Felicidad before, and it's puzzling to find a place where you will be comfortable without being lonely. But I have just remembered-"

Even as he was speaking, I lifted my eyes and looked once, and knew that the search was ended. I had found my house.

We were in that corner of Felicidad which is nearest the sunrise and the sea, where the fringing palmgrove stops, and the beach narrows to a bright spit of sand between the quiet waters of the bight and the steadily rolling current of the river. Before us stretched an untrodden lane, and at the end of it, almost in the shadow of the somber palms, a single house stood in a sunny garden.

It was such a house as I had never thought of finding there. It was built of stone, the same gray stone as the convent, and its roof was of old tiles, dully red. Tht low wall around the garden was of soft gray limestone, too, or coral rock, whichever it may have been.

The house was not large,-just large enough, I thought, to be dignified without losing its air of cosiness. The simple sweep and sureness of its lines made it, in its way, rather imposing.

"There," said I unhesitatingly, "is the house for me."

Don Feliciano glanced in the direction of my pointing finger and then turned away. "My dear Don Djon," he said, "I am sure that we can find a much more desirable place for you than that. Let us go on and try." His tone was urgent.

But I drew him down the lane with me, and at each step I was better pleased. "I am sure," I said again, "that I have found my house

at last, cleverly as it was hidden."

"But you cannot live there." said Don Feliciano, with a nervousness on him which was new to me.

"Why?" I asked.

The bluntness of the question seemed to embarrass him. "It is very damp," he said, after a little pause. "Even from here you can see the moss and the mold over everything."

"It stands on a little ridge," I said, "and the ground slopes off to sea and river on either hand. I don't see how it could well be better drained."

"I was referring," said Don Feliciano, "to the dampness of the air."

But it stands in the airiest place possible," I objected, in genuine surprise. "Not a breeze can blow from sea or mountain that will not draw across this tongue of land."

half-whispering way which caught my attention at once. "That means," I asked, "that it is supposed to be haunted? Don Feliciano, if you knew how I've looked forward to being a ghost myself and rehearsed my program once I was no longer cumbered with this body, you wouldn't refuse me the company of a kindred spirit."

"The house," Don Feliciano interposed hastily, "is not haunted in any ordinary sense, if such a word has any ordinary sense. It is simply -unfortunate.”

"Which means?"

"Only that misfortune came to some who dwelt here many years ago, and that no one has lived here since on that account."

"How many years ago?" I asked. "So many," said Don Feliciano, "that those who were young men and women then are very old men and women now, the few of them who are left."

"But this is a lonely isolation." "And therefore the fitter for a contentedly lonely man," said I. "It is half in ruins-"

"It is," said I, "like an old, old fiddle with multitudinous tiny cracks breaking the cramping gloss of the varnish. The house has evidently been mellowed by life."

"And by death, too, perhaps," suggested Don Feliciano, regaining his composure.

"By both, I hope," said I. "A house that has not is hardly fit to dwell in. New houses and new clothes are equally unattractive. If its age is the only objection you can raise "

"There is another," said Don Feliciano. "I suppose I must tell you what it is. The house is thought, by some at least, to be unfortunate."

He spoke the word in a hesitant,

"So," said I, gazing up at the

were come very close to the house by then, "even Felicidad, untroubled as it seems, has had its tragedy?"

"Many of the things young men call tragedies," said Don Feliciano, smiling faintly. "What foot of earth that men have trodden has not had them? We must accept the fact as best we can, or go to live in graveyards and have done with it." "What you have said," said I, "arouses my interest. Won't you tell me the whole story?"

He shook his head. "There is no story," he said. "A girl came to that house a bride, and lived there happily a little while, and died there. It is a common enough occurrence, and it happened so very long ago that few remember it."

"But you remember it?" I said, for it seemed to me that his voice held more emotion, of a very quiet sort, than belongs in the voice of

one who merely relates a tale he has heard.

"I

"Yes," said Don Feliciano. was a very young man then, but old enough to see the pity of it very clearly. The people who lived here were friends of mine. At the time, I remember, it seemed to me the most pitiable thing I had ever known."

"At any rate," said I, after a moment, "you have told me enough to assure me that the spirit which lingers here, if any does linger, is a very harmless one. I should love to talk with her, I think. I certainly should not be harmed or frightened by her coming."

"I am sure you need not be," said Don Feliciano gravely. "Fue dona cortesisima-she was a very gentle lady. But that is not what I meant. The house is thought to be unfortunate, and while I should not fear to live there now, I do not care to let a friend of mine unwittingly-" "Surely," said I, "you do not believe that any sinister influences-"

"Not that," said Don Feliciano. "I am not superstitious in that way. But each separate misfortune happens in a certain definite place. May it not be that misfortunes are likely to happen oftener-or happen to happen oftener, if you like that phrasing better,-in some places than in others? If that were so, then men, discovering such a place by any chance, would do well to avoid it."

I smiled a little at the odd fancy. "But surely," I objected, "this is not a place Mischance woud choose to dwell in. Look how quietly, peacefully beautiful it all is."

We had come to the end of the lane, and through a break in the low, moss-covered, vine-draped wall a bit of that old garden was in sight.

From the opening before us a broad walk flagged with well-trodden slabs of stone led to the low house gateway, closed with dark,

iron-studded doors. The path, on either hand, was walled with a tangle of neglected shrubbery. There was hibiscus there, scarlet and purple and white; and flaming caballero and golden kasubang; and many other brilliant-flowered things whose names I never heard. They were all netted together, and their untended shoots had thrown themselves across the path, half closing it with a fragile barrier. It was a garden which had escaped from its gardener.

Yet there was no confusion or wildness in the disorder of it, but just a charming carelessness, as if there exuberant Life had thrown off every plan which hedged it round. and were laughing in the innocent abandon of its freedom. And it was very peaceful there, too. It was that languorous hour of late afternoon which precedes the little stir of eventide, and not a breath of air was stirring. The sun beat down. hotly on the flags, chequering them with shadows of the motionless greenery above. The gorgeous tropical flowers hung drooping on their stems, and there was just the faintest hint of the rare fragrance of a Chinese cinnamon, hidden somewhere in the maze. The only sounds were the droning of a few slavishly industrious bees moving among the flowers, and the crooning of the ripple on the beach beyond the palms.

"This," said I, at last, "is no haunt of Mischance. It is the Garden of Pleasant Dreams. Already it is working magic on me. Just now I almost saw the little bride moving along the path among her flowers, stooping to pet the lowly ones and standing on tiptoe to pull the proud ones down and humble them.'

"That might almost be," said Don Feliciano. "She was very fond of flowers, I remember, and it is all changed very little."

"And I can see her, too," said I,