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% jacJ\ London ‘ Here you, woman, take oil my moccasins, and lively about it. I want Professor Smith to see how well I have you trained ’ ” Chapter V XI) there she was, boiling fish- chowder in a soot-covered pot, her glorious eyes inflamed by the acrid smoke of the open fire. Hers was a sad story. She was the one survivor in a million, as I had been, as the Chauffeur had been. On a crowning eminence of the Alameda Hills, over looking San Francisco Bay. Van Warden had built a vast summer palace. It was surrounded by a park of a thousand acres. When the plague broke out, Van Warden sent her there. Armed guards pa trolled the boundaries of the park, and nothing entered in the way of provisions or even mail matter that was not first fumigated. And yet did the plague enter, killing the guards at their posts, the servants at their tasks, sweeping away the whole army of retainers—or, at least, all of them who did not flee or die elsewhere. So it was that \esta found herself the sole living person in the palace that had become a charnel house. " Now the Chauffeur had been one of the servants that ran away. Returning, two months afterward, he discovered Vesta in a little summer pavilion where there had been no deaths and where she had established herself. He was a brute. She was afraid, and she ran away and hid among the trees. That night, on foot, she fled into the mountains— she, whose tender feet and delicate body had never known the bruise of stones nor the scratch of briars. He followed, and that night he caught her. He struck her. Do you understand, he beat her with those terrible lists of his and made her his slave. Synopsis of Previous Instalment—b was in the year 2073. Sixty years had passed since the Scarlet Plague had tumbled civilization back into the hunting and fishing stage. The last survivor of the great disaster was telling his savage grand-children as they sat on the deserted beach near San Francisco, of how it all hap pened. He had been a Professor of Fnglish Literature. When the plague reached San Francisco the population fled in mobs toward the country, fighting, robbing and killing each other. One by one they died until the Pro fessor was left apparently alone in the world. He saw the forest and the weeds sweep back over the cities and the domesticated animals return to the wild. At last years later he came upon a solitary man and then his mate. It was she who had to gather fhe firewood, build the fires, cook, and do all the degrading labor she, who had never performed a menial act in her life. These things he compelled her to do, while he, a proper savage, elected to lie around camp and look on. He did nothing, absolutely nothing, except on occasion to hunt meat or catch fish.” “Good for Chauffeur,” Hare-Lip commented in an undertone to the other boys. “1 remember him before he died. I le was a corker. But he did things, and he made things go. You know, Dad married his daughter, an’ you ought to see the way he knocked the spots outa Dad. The Chauffeur was a son-of-a-gun. He made us kids stand around. Kvcn when he was croakin’, he reached out for me, once, an’ laid my head open with that long stick he kept always beside him.” Hare-Lip rubbed his bullet-head reminiscently, and the boys returned to the old man, who was maundering ecstatically about Vesta, the squaw of the founder of the Chauffeur Tribe. “And so I say to you that you cannot understand the awfulness of the situation. The Chauffeur was a servant, understand, a servant. And he cringed, with bowed head, to such as she. She was a lord of life, both by birth and by marriage. The destinies of millions, such as he, she carried in the hollow of her pink-white hand. And, in the days before the plague, the slightest contact with such as he would have been pollution. Oh, 1 have seen it. Once, I remember, there was Mrs. Goldwin, wife of one of the great magnates. It was on a landing stage, just as she was embarking in her private dirigible, that she dropped her parasol. A servant picked it up and made the mistake of handing it to her—to her, one of the greatest ladies of the land! She shrank back, as though he were a leper, and indicated her secretary to receive it. Also, she or dered her secretary to ascertain the creature’s name and to see that he was immediately discharged from service. And such a woman was Vesta Van Warden. And her the Chauffeur beat and made his slave. “—Bill that was it; Bill, the Chauffeur. That was his name. He was a wretched, primitive man, wholly devoid of the liner instincts and chivalrous promptings of a cultured soul. Xo, there is no absolute justice, for to him fell that wonder of womanhood, V'esta Van Warden. Fhe grievousne-s of this you will never understand, my grandsons; for you are yourselves primitive little savages, unaware of aught else but savagery. W hy should. Vesta not have been mine? 1 was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university. Even so, in the time before the plague, such was her exalted position, she would not have deigned to know that I existed. Mark, then, the abysmal degradation to which she fell at the hands of the Chauffeur. Nothing less than the destruction of all mankind had made it possible that I should know her, 3 Copyright, 1913, by the Star Co.