Augustus allowed himself to be led away through the sad streets of the November night without further question. His own will was in abeyance, and the other seemed aware of this, for he shuffled along without even turning his head to make sure that he was followed. Augustus might easily have disappeared, but fear drew him after the man with a force as irresistible as gravity, as malignant as the power of a dream.

It was a clear night following rain, and the streets were wet and shiny. The perspective of the tram-lines was marked out by a converging series of interrupted streaks of brightness where the metals reflected the yellow glare of the lamps, two long rows of lessening yellow spots with haloes of illuminated moisture round them. Tramway cars were a pageant of approaching and receding lights, and cabs black shades seen for a moment against illuminated patches of the road, and lost again in gloom.

But these more frequented thoroughfares were soon left behind, and Augustus was hurried on to a desolate region of the shabby genteel, where small houses with fronts of blackened stucco looked down upon small front gardens blackened also like themselves. The man stopped at last at one of these houses, and, followed by Augustus, made his way along the few yards of narrow asphalt path to the door, on which was the legend:

"M. TIBERGE, Professor of French."

* * *

T

HE room into which Augus

tus was ushered was but the ordinary "front sittingroom" of the fourth-rate lodging house, though, with its lace curtains, its table with the crimson cover, its chairs and sofa of American cloth, its wicker arm-chair, and the cheap prints on the walls, it produced an effect of luxury and gentility in his eyes.

It was plain that the present occupant of the room inhabited it without in any way impressing his own personality on it. There was but one unusual feature about this room, a massive safe which stood on the floor beside the window, and which alone suggested to Augustus the element of mystery which he had come to expect. The familiar atmosphere of the prosaic was, however, a consolation to him, for it seemed to laugh at the undefined terrors that had assailed him. ¶ "Take a seat, please, take a seat," said M. Tiberge, who had opened a cupboard, and was taking from it various kinds of food and dishes, which he dotted about the table with an elephantine attempt at hospitality.

"Come!" he said; "you are hungry-starving, is it not so? You shall eat while I explain to you my 'wants.'

He placed a plate and a knife and fork before Augustus, who found in the new geniality something nearly as awful as the previous mystery and silence, for the look of potential ferocity in the man's eyes was still unwarmed, though some of the bristles on his face could be seen to project at a new angle, as though the unseen mouth were practicing a smile.

Augustus was bewildered by the miscellaneous array of eatables set before him on small plates. There was part of a large sausage, such as he had seen in foreign eating-houses in the city, but had never contemplated tasting; there were the remains of a cold rice-pudding, made solidly with eggs and studded with raisins; there were some sardines, in a tin, a little pot of cavaire which he took for black

berry jam, and fortunately, a homely loaf of bread. A bottle of thin white wine of a kind new to him he would gladly have exchanged for the solid sedative refreshment of bitter beer. But he made what shift he could.

"It was only hunger that put me in such a funk," he said to himself, as the confidence of the full man returned; and he found the eyes and the beard on the opposite side of the table looming less baleful.

"You are an expert in clockwork?" M. Tiberge asked at last.

"Well, that depends on what you mean. I know my work."

"Surely, surely," replied M. Tiberge. "But I thought from a casual glance at your shop that perhaps you were something of a specialist. I observed what seemed to me an unusual proportion of alarm clocks. Now, those were those of your own construction ?"

Then Augustus's heart gave a great bound. Was it possible that his talent was to be recognized at last? That his hobby was even now to bring him fame and fortune? He was indeed a specialist in alarm clocks. All his intelligence and all his enthusiasm had been spent on such devices; but hitherto it had been only an amusement that he could ill afford. For the first time he felt himself of some value in the world and answered with a new confidence.

"I have given a good deal of attention to the subject, sir. Most of those clocks were my own designing. But they don't sell."

"Exactly. An unappreciative public has reduced you to a condition approximately to want, is it not so?"

"The fact is, I'm bust up," said Augustus.

"No, no, my friend. You have You have found me, or rather, I have found you. Henceforth you will abandon the public as it has already abandoned you, and I will introduce you to those who will appreciate your talents."

"You really are Augustus Livers

edge, and this is not a dream or a pantomime"-so ran Augustus's thoughts as he kept pressing the heel of one boot on the toe of the other, relishing the certainty of pain.

"Yes," continued M. Tiberge, "we have met for our mutual advantage. You have great need of money, but you have the technical skill which I and my-er-associates-need, and for which I can pay you, adequately if not handsomely. I have some skill in discovering the right people to serve me; it is my profession. I have been long looking for someone with a thorough knowledge of clock-making, especially of alarm escapements. I have looked in at your shop window many times."

M. Tiberge paused, and Augustus bowed in great bewilderment. His amazement was complete as his host swept some crumbs from the table and proceeded to sprinkle them at intervals alongthe wainscot.

"Pardon me," said M. Tiberge; "I do this for the mice. There is hardly any class of the community that suffers more at the hands of humanity than these charming little creatures. Even my landladly here, in other respects I believe a kindly woman, sets traps for them in the kitchen. I make a practice of liberating her victims so soon as I have reason to believe her asleep."

A couple of mice were already feeding with the utmost confidence on the floor, and M. Tiberge watched them. with beaming eyes, which nevertheless renewed in Augustus his first thrill of unaccountable horror.

"But we are wasting time," said M. Tiberge, clearing the table. "We must come to business. I propose to retain your services of a salary of five pounds a week."

Augustus gasped.

"For that I shall expect to be able to command you whenever and wherever I wish, but you will, of course, be paid in addition for any work you do. Do you agree?"

Augustus tried in vain to express

his astonishment and thanks.

¶ "Very well," said M. Tiberge, producing a shabby leather purse and taking five sovereigns from it, which he pushed across to Augustus, "here is your first week's salary."

Augustus put the coins in his waistcoat pocket and kept his finger on them as though their milled edges represented his last grip on reality.

"You will, if you please, enter on your duties at once. I wish you to start at once on a piece of work of some delicacy and of the utmost importance. I believe I have here all the materials you will require; in fact, I can provide everything except the technical skill. That, unfortunately, I have never been able to acquire.'

"I hope I shall be able to manage," said Augustus dubiously.

"I have no doubt that to you the matter will appear childishly simple." Here M. Tiberge approached the safe, taking a bunch of keys from his pocket. As he inserted the litle key that moved the mighty levers of the safe door, Augustus's heart beat with he knew not what strange expectation. M. Tiberge bent downward to turn the key, but he did not turn it. He paused, and keeping his hand still on the key, turned slowly to Augustus again the impassive face of a beast about to spring.

"I forgot to mention," he said softly, "that our transactions are confidential."

Augustus nodded, even the nod costing him an effort.

"Your poverty," M. Tiberge continued, "was in itself a recommendaation, it made you dependent upon me for a living. You depend on secrecy for your life."

There was no answer from Augustus beyond a sudden appearance of perspiration on his forehead. A mouse scurried behind the wainscot, and the wainscot, and then M. Tiberge opened the safe.

ber of objects wrapped in brown paper. M. Tiberge lifted out the largest of these and placed it tenderly on the table. He carefully removed its wrappings and exposed what was essentially a small French clock. But its function as a timepiece was the least thing about this clock. It represented the lifework and the enthusiasm of some imperial artist in jewelry. The front of the clock, a cameo carved in a single onyx, was about nine inches long. The face stood out in translucent, yellowish relief, with the hours and a figure of Time left in higher relief of pure opaque white. The rest was sculptured to represent the favorite old French design of the Seven Deadly Sins, before which, even in that that strained moment, Augustus blushed. The rest of the case was made of great crystals of chrysoberyl joined with the cunning of a lost art. The whole was supported and enclosed in a golden vine which rose from a pedestal of spreading roots in solid gold. The fruit of the vine was represented by clusters of uncut sapphire, and diamonds sparkled on the leaves like raindrops newly poised.

tus.

¶

"It is unique!" murmured Augus

"No. It is an imitation," said M. Tiberge. "The original is worth an English county. But this has cost years of time and the lives of men and their freedom, the honor of women, and I know not what of money to produce. Yet, with the exception of the onyx, it is sham-all sham. Beside the original even the workmanship is but as brickwork. Yet it will serve. It is the dayspring from on high!"

The last words were uttered with a kind of devotional fervor that for the first time seemed to purge the strange bearded face of its savagery, its cunning, and its implacable hatred of something.

The little watchmaker, still fingering the milled edges of his coins, was the first to come down to reality.

"What am I to do with it?" he asked.

"I am coming to that. It is very simple. What is not so simple is to forget that you have ever seen it. Else there is no safety for you. Open the back of it."

Augustus did as he was told, though his hands trembled. He was relieved to see that the works were of simple and familiar type. While he was thus engaged M. Tiberge produced from the safe a number of smaller parcels, containing cogwheels, a steel clock-spring, several pairs of pliers, and the hammer drills, screwdrivers, and other tools essential to the clockmaker's art, with a thin brass cylinder about the size and shape of a cigarette.

"Examine it well," he said. ¶ "I must remove the works." "You may do so, carefully." Augustus was now happily soothed by his professional preoccupation, and soon had deftly taken the works out of the case.

"That is good. You have now to fix inside the case this cylinder," said M. Tiberge, holding up the piece of brass tube, "and add to the works an arrangement which will cause this cogwheel to go off, rotating as rapidly as possible one-sixteenth of an inch from the lower end of the cylinder at any hour for which it may be set. You understand?"

"Yes. But I should have to think. that out. It is not simple."

"It must be done tonight."
Augustus shook his head.

¶ "Give me a definite time," he said; "one hour, two, three, twelve; anything you like, and I can do it at once, but I can't make it vary."

"Think again. You must." said M. Tiberge.

"It's no use, sir. All the clockmakers in England couldn't do it-not in the time. You must fix an inter

val."

Augustus spoke with the conviction and finality of an expert. The

other stuck a claw-like hand into his beard and sat forward with an elbow on the table, looking at Augustus but not seeing him, with the angry speculation in his eyes of a man facing a problem for which he is unprepared. "It is terrible that this decision should. be left to me," he muttered "There are others who should decide."

Then, after a pause: "You could be fixing the cylinder anyhow."

Augustus took up a drill and set to work, and for a time there was no sound in the room but the breathing of the two men and the clicking and tapping and rasping of the clockmaker's tools.

"Yes. It must take place in two hours from being set." "The alarm?"

"Alarm? Ha, ha! Yes, yes; to be sure; the alarm!"

For the first time M. Tiberge laughed. He laughed open-mouthed like a hyena, and Augustus learned that to have one's hair standing on end was not a mere figure of speech. Then in a flash he realized what he was asked to do.

"You are making an infernal machine!" he cried, springing up.

I seem some

T may seem to some that the

very dense, that his eyes had been a long time in been a long time in opening; but which of us is in a hurry to welcome the utterly improbable? Augustus had heard with his ears, and the news

papers had declared unto him, that there were such people as Anarchists and others who blew up men and palaces with explosives. But what had such to do with him and his daily round of sordid anxieties, with his little prosaic personality and the prosaic streets of the city that he lived in, where even crime was only the outcome of prosaic and besotted conditions of life? What had dynamite or anarchy to do with him? As much as the pterodactyl! He risked the insult for the sake of the luxury of having it contradicted.

CM. Tiberge eyed him with calm. contempt but without indignation.

in other countries it is not so. There the power of persecution is still vested in individuals. We have but to remove these one by one-painlessly-and go on until others dare no longer come forward to fill their places, and then at last mankind will live in unison. But the process is slow, and oh, how difficult! All the time and brains and money that have been lavished on this little clock that you are now completing will only remove a few, and others will succeed them before the burden of pain is lifted for ever from the people."

"I shall have nothing to do with it," said Augustus.

Then M. Tiberge looked steadily at him and again some of the bristles on his face rose up as if the truth behind them were smiling. The clockmaker bent to his work again with something like a sob.

"You will now proceed with your work on the basis of a two hours' alarm."

"I beg your pardon," said Augustus, returning to his tools.

"You can finish tonight?"

"In an hour if you like. It is quite simple now."

¶ "Good!" said M. Tiberge, and Augustus worked on.

"Yes, my young friend; it is for the eventual abolition of all suffering that you are working; the newest recruit to a vast army. Some of the suffering of the world is caused by the forces of Nature, and that kind of pain men have always combated-in vain. But that inevitable suffering is but a drop in the ocean of the pain men cause each other, and that can be abolished, will be abolished by degrees. Here in England you suffer under a system that your tyrants say you have built up for yourselves, and you, like fools, have believed them until now; you know not where to strike. But

be of use to me in the future," said M. Tiberge. "In letting you into this secret I have trusted, not you, but your fear of me. When you leave this house, there is nothing else to prevent your going straight to inform your stupid police. I shall not even follow you or watch you, for you dare do nothing without my will."

Augustus crouched lower at the table, knowing this to be true. He looked back on the life he had leftthe life of want, and debt, and hunger, and disappointment-as a drowning man might look back on secure prison. He looked forward to a vision of himself in the future as of a wretch cowering in a dungeon not made by hands, dragging fetters of something heavier and more horrible

than iron.

CM. Tiberge approached the safe again and took from it another packet It contained a tin, which he opened gently and from which he drew some cotton-wool. Unwrapping this, he showed Augustus six small white rods of a substance that looked like camphor.