of his own rifle as he leapt behind him...

My God!... What have I done?...

Have I gone mad? Or are my eyes deceived?

My God! Have mercy on me... My brother, my companion, my soul — what? What has befallen you??

But his friend opened his eyes, smiled the smile of one taking leave of life, and said to Fouad:

"No bla..... me... my. bro... ther...

And he closed his lids, and his chest went on rising and falling while the crimson blood streamed from a deep, grievous wound in his side...

The peasants hastened from the neighboring fields to see what had happened... They found a young man of twenty lying senseless, death rippling over his face, drowned in a lake of blood... Cries for help rose high, and the wounded man was carried on shoulders from the forest to the village. Then a car bore him to the nearest city hospital, though ninety-nine in a hundred of the links in the chain of his life had already snapped. And Fouad was taken ahead to prison, that the investigation might take its course.

•

...And I found myself vainly wiping away the tears of this little girl, to whom nothing of life had ever been revealed but its dark corner... I took hold of her fevered hand as she fell to raving and screaming at the top of her voice: He is dead... dead... My brother will not come back... he will not come back...

And a tear leapt from my eye as I repeated with the little one:

Yes... her brother will not come back... But the misery written upon so many people comes back and comes back, leaving them no chance to breathe the breezes of happiness and contentment in this life...

I wonder! With what shade of

all the shades of consolation and solace could I bring into the heart of this wretched girl one grain of reassurance, one gleam of hope, after despair had sunk into her depths and taken up its abode... after pain had occupied her whole soul, her whole being...

What melody of the music of green life could the lyre of my soul pour out, and pour again, to flood and encompass with it the world of this child, whose whole heart the moans of the sick winter and the strains of black funerals have shattered, snatching every

laughing look from the gleam of her two innocent eyes.

This little bud, the spring of whose life the beaten autumn has taken for its own. And so cries of pain went up from the heart of her shattered heart...

And the little one started up out of my hand as she heard her mistress's rising voice wounding her ears:

Come here! Have you not had enough yet of idling and play?

And she raised in her hand a pomegranate rod that itself ached at striking this hapless girl a blind, wailing beating...

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