Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/36

Rh the heavy envelope, pressed suddenly against its ends, so that its sides bulged out, and dumped its contents on the counterpane. Ten twenty-dollar bills dropped on the coverlet. And nothing else.

"Two hundred dollars!" Arabella gasped. "Why——"

"As a birthday gift for petit Monsieur Dennis, one surmises," de Grandin smiled, "Eh bien, the old one had a sense of humor underneath his ugly outward shell, it seems. He kept you on the tenterhooks lest the message in this envelope were one of evil import, while all the time it was a present of congratulation."

"But such a gift from Uncle Warburg—I can't understand it!" Arabella murmured wonderingly.

"Perhaps it is as well, Madame," he answered as we rose to go. "Be happy with the gift, and give your ancient uncle credit for at least one act of kindliness. Au 'voir."

ANGED if I can understand it either," I told him as we left the hospital. "If that old curmudgeon had left a message berating them for fools for having offspring, it would have been more in character, but such a gift—well, I'm surprized."

Amazingly, de Grandin halted in mid-stride and laughed until the tears rolled down his face. "Parbleu, my friend," he told me when he managed to regain his breath, "I do not think that your surprize is half so great as that of Monsieur Warburg Tantavul!"

ENNIS TANTAVUL regarded me with misery-haunted eyes. "I just can't understand it," he admitted. "It's all so sudden, so utterly——"

"Pardonnez-moi," de Giandin interrupted from the door of the consulting-room, "I could not help but hear your last remark, and if it is not an intrusion——"

"Not at all," the young man answered. "I'd like the benefit of your advice. It's Arabella, and I'm dreadfully afraid that she——"

"Non, do not try it, mon ami," de Grandin warned. "Do you give us the symptoms, let us make the diagnosis. He who acts as his own doctor has a fool for a patient, you know."

"Well, then, here are the facts: This morning Arabella woke me up, crying as though her heart would break. I asked her what the trouble was, and she looked at me as if I were a stranger—no, not exactly that, rather as if I were some dreadful thing she'd suddenly discovered lying by her side. Her eyes were positively round with horror, and when I tried to take her in my arms and comfort her she shrank away as though I were infected with the plague.

"'Oh, Dennie, don't!' she begged, and positively cringed away from me. Then she sprang out of bed, and drew her kimono about her as though she were ashamed to have me see her in pajamas, and ran sobbing from the room.

"Presently I heard her crying in the nursery, and went down there to try and comfort her——" He paused, and tears started to his eyes. "She was standing by the crib where little Dennis lay, looking at him with tears streaming down her cheeks, and in her hand she held a long, sharp steel letter-opener. 'Poor little mite; poor little flower of unpardonable sin,' she said. 'We've got to go, Baby darling; you to limbo, I to hell—oh, God wouldn't, couldn't be so cruel as to damn you for your parents' sin!—but we'll all three suffer torment endlessly, because we didn't know!'

"She raised the knife to plunge it in