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Show FATE'S PRACTICAL JOKE. The Story of an Honorable Man. His cuff-buttons were two joined hearts. When you learn further that he was married, you have his character completely in two swift strokes like a Japanese picture. John Fethorcll's life had given him just one intimate in-timate friend among women. Ho loved her from the first to the last, utterly. He was wholly faithful to her in advance of her coming into lug life when she was only a prospective sweetheart. From the time ho met her, tin he compelled her love and her betrothal, past the ame of affiance into the honeymoon, and on through the subsidence into the humdrum of married life, he was altogether faithful to the highest ideal she could have set for him. Nor was this a mere matter of material fidelity fi-delity of deeds. Had his wife been able to read even his inmost thoughts, and followed his secret desires, she could have found only unswerving faithfulness. faith-fulness. John Fetherell led what we choose to call a narrow life; his creed, though elaborate, was not cosmopolitan. To its length complication of articles, ar-ticles, sections, by-laws and amendments he was not only a devout subscriber, but a devout servant In short, along with complete lack of austerity or Pharisaism, John Fetherell was the incarnation of piety. To him creeds outlined deeds, and deeds creeds. He was a good man. It was well for his relations with Mrs. John Fetherell that this was so. She was his autotype in the other sex. She was as tender-hearted as he, as devoted, as faithful, as pious. Like him, she ab horred the idea of a separate standard for the judgment judg-ment of men and women. Had she reason for believing be-lieving that the slightest tendency to wander from' her existed in her husband's heart, her love for him woinvi not have been wounded; it would have been slain. She would have left his roof at once. She would thereafter have dispised him, hated him, and refused him her forgivenness eternally. The only nights John Fetherell spent away from his own hearth and carpet-slippers were those on which Mrs. Fetherell and he sallied forth together to prayer-meeting, lecture or neighborly call, and the occasional nights he stayed late and alone at the office, playing hide and seek with his trial balance bal-ance among labyrinthine figures. On a certain night that was none of these usual nights he did not come home. Mrs. Fetherell'j psychological itinerary went from surprise to wonder, thence to amazement thence through alarm to panic. Suspicion that he might be kept away by any motive of his own never entered her mind. "When she could no longer endure the tormenting tor-menting pictures of danger and distress drawn by her imagination, she rang for a messenger boy, and had his lilliputian escort down midnight streets to the house of a friend, Deacon Hampton, whom she rang up and told her fears in hysterical accents. She refused all his suggestions that the delay might be duo to any number of ordinary causes. Finally, to quiet her, he telephoned to Police Head- quarters. A hint from them and a clue from the i Fire Department and a direction from one hospital to another brought the telephonic sleuth at length by dqvious ways, to the Hospital. Deacon Hampton, toga'd in his batn-robe, was so deeply engrossed in his cross-wire limbic race that he forgot the presence near him of Mrs. Fetherell, whom his wife in curl-papers and a wrapper, was trying vainly to restrain from violent weeping. But nothing availed to calm Mrs. FetherclPs sob3 till she overheard one end of the conversation Deacon Dea-con Hampton was carrying on loudly without thought of eavesdroppers. "Hello! hello!" stormed the Deacon, at an in-Visible in-Visible and, to the women, inaudible being. "Is this the Hospital ? Is. $lr, John Fetherell Feth-erell there? Oh, he is? Is he seriously injured? What? Dead? How? When? Where? Found I burned .o death in th street. Impossible man, 1 impossible? What's that? Found dead in the I arms of of whom 1 Maggie Hicks! Not the notorious Maggie Hicks? Nonsense, man, you don't know Mr. Fethcrell. You poor fool, you've got the wrong man. Positive identification, eh? Humph! What is ib? Letters in his pockets and addressed to him? His coat was found on the floor unburned, eh? It's all a terrible, a silly mistake, I say. Don't in heaven's name let the newspapers get it. What! the reporters have it already. You infernal scoundrel you! You vile" but a sharp ring showed that the man at the other end had cut short the unpleasant trend of the conversation. Making a tremendous effort at a calm and benevolent benev-olent hypocrisy the scarlet Deacon turned to Mrs. Fethcrell, and murmured tenderly: "My dear woman, there has been an accident. Your husband is not wea, he" But Mrs. Fetherell's face was so stern ana cold that her lingering tears were as dew upon marble. She dashed them away as if they shamed her, and said in a tone of icy indifference: "I have heard everything, Mr. Hampton. I understand un-derstand everything. You cannot deceive me." "But," interposed the Deacon, on the point of a collapse, "there may be some terrible mistake." "It is not possible. To males sure, I shall go at once to the hospital." And refusing the Deacon's proffered attendance she strode out with the high dignity of Juno hearing hear-ing some new escapade of Jupiter's. Her knight-errant, knight-errant, the messenger boy, followed. An old friend of Fetherell's had come down from Boston that afternoon and draggod the protesting husband off to dinner at his hotel. Fethcrell had gracefully declined wine at the table. He had also icfused an invitation to the theatre, giving other reasons than his conscientious scruples against that "vstibule of hell," the play-house. He had left at about 9 o'clock for home, taking a short cut through the wild and western end of th street. In his sublime innocence Fethcrell had remained ignorant of the real nature of uie inhabitants of this section. The place was. an inelegant "Tenderloin," "Tender-loin," a sort of "Rump Steak," you might say. To be seen entering or leaving that street was to submit sub-mit oneself to very definite imputations. This the guileless Fethcrell knew nothing of. He fared the moral jungle like a virgin knight, a Sir Galahad. As he passed an apartment house, whose front door stood most hospitably open, the scream of a woman in terror made icicles of his veins. The other inhabitants of the house were too much inured to the screams of women under the spell of drunkenness drunk-enness or delirium tremens, or under the heel of irate lovers, to pay particular attention to this particular par-ticular outburst. But for good John Fetuerell only one course was possible rescue. He ran lightly up the deserted stairway and, finding the door unlocked, un-locked, enetered the room whence the shrieks rang forth. The sight he saw there threw him back against the door and closed it. He was in the lair of Maggie Hicks, a girl whose beauty and recklessness had made her name a prov- 1 erb about towm She was unwontedly alone in M her room and she had sat on her bed reading a yel- g low novel. In her ecstatic attention to the triumph of the heroine's purity over the villain's wilos, fl she had allowed her forty- fifth cigarette to go out. In relighting it hastily, at a lamp on the table, at her side, she had tipped the frail pharos over into her lap. Her light wrapper and her bed were im- mdiately one blaze. She leaped from her pyre with a wild shriek and ran up and down the room in a vain panic, like a H high-bred, fire-maddened mare. Her motion fanned mm the blazes to greater fury, and John Fetherell's mm eyes beheld a serpentine dance of real flames, that H out-Loied Loie's fiercest blazes of drapery. H When the tormented girl saw Fethcrell she rushed j upon him, imploring aid. He whipped off his heavy B woolen coat to wrap about her, but she flung her H arms around him in a frenzy of torture, and ho diopped the coat. He could not tear himself aWay, H ,As ll gasped in furious struggle, his panting lungs took deep draughts of flame. One mad cry had escaped him, and the terror in this, a man's voice, had at last brought aid. But the people that poured into the room could hardly save their own nomes by putting out the spreading flames. The rugs they threw upon Maggie Mag-gie and her unknown companion covered only two hideous logs of flesn. The two souls were loosed smoke upon the air. No one had heard Fetncrell go up the stairway. Maggie was never intentionally alone. Viola tout! The story the people gave police and ambulance surgeons was not marred with any doubts. Out of formality the bodies were taken to the hospital, but the souls were beyound recapture. The letters found in the discarded coat gave the name and business address of an obscure citizen. Two more calamities for Venus's sake, oila tout I The evidence Mrs. Fetherell found at the hospital letters, a ring, a watch removed the last jot of doubt from her outraged heart. She feared that a sight of the dead man might cause a weed of pity to spring up in her perfect contempt for the trickster that had been her husband. She found in his watch a picture of him and of her, loving check to cheek. She tore it across with a gasp of disgust. Every word he had ever spoken, every protestation of complete fidelity, every appearance of devotion all the fair ways and deeds that had endeared him now took on a Jook of cunning duplicity, and became be-came to her heart only the Dead Sea fruit of hypocrisy. She dashed her handkerchief across her lips to efface the memory stains of his kisses, but felt the attempt as vain as Lady Macbeth's much washing of her little white hand. As Mrs. Fethcrell tore out of her heart all trust in mankind and planted eternal cynicism there, Fate held her fat sides for laughter. As Mrs. Fetherell passed homeward along the street she flung into the gutter something the surgeon sur-geon had given her just before she left the hospital The young hobo that saw the glint of gold and stopped to pick it up found, to his Bacchantic delight, de-light, a pair of gold sleeve links: the design, two joined hearts. From Town Topics. |