A NEW THEORY OF A CERTAIN WICKED MAN The time of the first sorrow was difficult for the boy.

There was that first hard sleep after one we love has gone--in which we must always dream that it is not true--a sleep from which we awaken to suffer all the shock of it again.

Then came black nights when the perfect love for the perfect father came back in all its early tenderness to cry the little boy to sleep.

Yet it went rapidly enough at last, as times of sorrow go for the young.

There even came a day when he found in a secret place of his heart a chastened, hopeful inquiry if all might not have been for the best.