BEING

I

Barnes Common seemed a very large place. The Sailor was afraid he would not be able to keep on much longer, but he had learned endurance in his six years before the mast. Weeks and months together he had just kept on keeping on while he had sailed the terrible seas. At that time there was no magic talisman to hold him to his course, there was neither hope nor faith of the world to be. But now it was otherwise. Surely he had no reason to give in, just as a new heaven and a new earth were opening before his eyes.

He came presently to a row of houses. A road was beyond and traffic was passing along it. The hope of a coffee stall sprang to his mind. He walked doggedly along the road, until at a point where it was merged in an important thoroughfare he came upon a cabman’s shelter. And there within, in answer to his faith, were the things he sought. Through the open door was a fire, a smell of steaming fluids, of frying meats, and an honest bench on which to enjoy them.

He asked no leave, but stumbled in and at the beck of his powerfully stimulated senses ordered a kingly repast, and spread both hands before the fire. Sausages and mashed potatoes were brought to him and he sat down to eat, just as a very cheerful looking cabman entered with a face of professional red, and wearing apparel not unworthy of an arctic explorer.

The cabman ordered a cup of cocoa and a "doorstep," and that justice might be done to them sat on the bench by the young man’s side. A little while they ate in silence, for both were very hungry. Then under the influence of food and a good fire the cabman talked. His sociability enabled the Sailor to ask an important question.

"Can you tell me, mister, of lodgings, clean and decent, for a single man?"

"What sort o' lodgings are you wantin', mister?" The cabman was favorably impressed by the young man’s air of politeness.

"Lodgings clean and decent," said the Sailor.

"I know that," said the cabman urbanely, "but what do you want to pay fur 'em?"

The Sailor reflected. There were nineteen sovereigns and twelve half-sovereigns in his belt; all the same, he was enough of a landsman to know the value of money.

"I want to live cheap," he said, with extreme simplicity. "Just as cheap as I can, and be clean and decent, too."

The cabman let his large wise eyes flow over the Sailor, and quietly took his measure as became a veteran of the town.

"Ever tried Bowdon House?"

The Sailor shook his head.

The cabman ruminated.

"Tizzey a day fur your cubicle an' the use o' the kitchen fire."

The young man was not insulted, although the cabman feared he might have been, so good were his clothes, so gravely courteous his aspect.

"O' course," said the cabman, "it ain’t Buckingham Palace, it’s no use purtendin' it is."

"So long as it’s clean and decent," said the Sailor.

"I give you my word for that. Never stayed there myself, but I know them as has."

The Sailor nodded.

"O' course, it ain’t the Sizzle. I don’t say that all on 'em moves in high circles, that would be tellin' a lie, but if you don’t mind all sorts there’s wuss homes, they tell me, in this metropolus, than Bowdon House."

The young man said he would try it, anyway, if it wasn’t far.

"It’s at the back o' Victoria," said the cabman. "Can’t miss it if you go sharp to the left at the second turnin' past the station."

Henry Harper had to confess that he didn’t know the way to Victoria Station.

"It’s quite easy," said the cabman. "Buss 14 that goes by here will set you down at Victoria. Then do as I say, or ask a bobby to put you right."

Armed with these instructions, Henry Harper presently set out for Bowdon House. Feeling much better for a good meal and human intercourse, he found it without difficulty. Bowdon House was a large and somber building. Its exterior rather abashed the Sailor. But a sure instinct warned him that now he could not afford to be abashed by anything. Therefore he entered and boldly paid the sum of sixpence for a vacant cubicle.

The beds might not be equal to the Sizzle, but they were clean and decent undoubtedly, and not too hard for a sailor. You could have a bath for a penny, you could keep your own private frying pan, you were allowed the use of the kitchen range to cook any food you liked to buy, and a comfortable place was provided where you could sit and eat it. The company was mixed, it was true, as the cabman had said, but these were solid advantages, and the chief of them at the moment, in the opinion of Henry Harper, was that you could go to bed when you liked and stay there forever if only you continued to pay your six-pence a night.

The first thing the young man did was to have a hot bath. He then hired for a penny a nightgown, as clean and decent as his cubicle, and within a very short time was in a sleep so long and deep that it banished entirely the new fear that had crept into his brain.

About five o’clock in the evening he awoke a new man. After a toilet as careful as the absence of a razor and a hairbrush would permit, he found his way to the common room. He felt extremely hungry, but the outlay of another six-pence, brought him a pot of tea, some brown bread and butter, and a slice of meat pie.

There was only one other patron in the common room, and he at once attracted Henry Harper’s curiosity. This individual was engaged in toasting a muffin at the large and clear fire, and even with the Sailor’s experience of Miss Foldal in this kind, he had never seen one of these delightful articles dealt with in a manner of such sacerdotal delicacy.

A blue china plate was warming before the fire, and the muffin was presently placed on it, soaked in butter in true Miss Foldal style, and brought to table piping hot. The young man had chosen a place as near the fire as he could get, and the muffin expert took a place opposite, poured out a brew of tea from his own blue china teapot, and to the Sailor’s amazement squeezed a little lemon juice into it.

This Sybarite was eating his first piece of muffin with an air of feminine elegance when he suddenly caught the young man’s eye. The limpid glance seemed to stimulate his own blue orb to a mild and calm curiosity. The Sybarite looked the young man up and down, but continued to eat his muffin with a kind of apostolic pleasantness, which somehow recalled to Henry Harper the Reverend Rogers and a certain famous tea-party at the Brookfield Street Mission Hall in his distant youth.

Presently, to Henry Harper’s grave surprise, the muffin eater was pleased to discourse a little of men and things.

The Sailor in his genuine modesty was flattered, moreover he was charmed. Never in all his wanderings had he heard a man discourse in this way. It might have been Klondyke himself—​at times there was an odd resemblance to that immortal in the occasional grace notes of the Sybarite. Yet it was a suggestion rather than a resemblance. This was a kind of composite of Klondyke and the Reverend Rogers, a Klondyke raised to a higher intellectual power.

Of course, this was only one aspect of the Sybarite, and that the least important, because with every allowance for the sacred memory of the Reverend Rogers, the person opposite was quite the most wonderful talker Henry Harper had ever heard in his life.

Had the Sailor heard the music of Palestrina, which at that period was a pleasure to come, he might have imagined he was listening to it. The voice of the Sybarite was measured yet floating, his phrases were endless yet perfectly rounded and definite, there was a note of weariness, older than the world, yet there was a charm, a lucidity, a mellow completeness that was perfectly amazing. The Sailor, with a wonderful talisman now burning bright in his soul, was enchanted.

This remarkable person owned, with a sort of frankness which was not frankness at all, that there were just two things he could do of practical utility. One, it seemed, was to toast a muffin with anybody, the other was to make the perfect cup of tea. Here he ended and here he began. He had also the rather unacademic habit of quoting dead languages in a manner so remarkably impressive as to bewilder the Sailor.

Henry Harper listened with round eyes. He devoured the Sybarite. His talisman seemed to tell him that he was on the verge of worlds denied to the common run of men. This remarkable person had even a private language of his own. He used words and phrases so charged with esoteric meanings that they somehow seemed to make the Aladdin’s lamp burn brighter in the Sailor’s soul. He had a knowledge of books comprehensive and wonderful, of all ages and countries apparently, yet when the young man ventured to ask timidly, but with a sort of pride in his question, whether he had read the "Pickwick Papers," the answer overthrew him completely.

"God forbid," said the Sybarite.

Henry Harper was utterly defeated. And yet he was charmed. Here was a depth far beyond Miss Foldal, who had suggested that he should get a ticket for the Free Library in order to be able to read Charles Dickens.

"I suppose, sir"--the "sir" would have had the sanction of Ginger, the perfect man of the world--"I suppose, sir, you don’t think much of Charles Dickens?"

After all, that was what the Sybarite really meant.

"Not necessarily that. He is simply not in one’s ethos, don’t you know."

The Sailor was baffled completely, but in some way he was a shrewd young man. He had soon decided that it would be wiser to listen than attempt to talk himself.

The Sybarite was fastidious but he was not shy. He liked to speak out of the depths of his wisdom to a fit audience if the spirit was on him. He knew that he talked well, even beautifully; the immortal flair of the artist was there; and in this strange young man with the deep eyes was the perfect listener, and that was what the soul of the Sybarite always demanded.

The Sailor listened with a kind of fascinated intensity; also he watched all that the Sybarite did with a sense of esthetic delight. His lightest movements, like his voice, were ordered, feline, sacramental. It made no difference whether he was toasting muffins, buttering them, or merely eating them; whether he was pouring out tea or conveying it in a blue china cup to his lips, it was all done in a manner to suggest the very poetry of motion. And when it came to a matter of rolling a cigarette, which it presently did, the almost catlike grace of the long and slender hands that were so clean and kept so perfectly, touched a chord very deep in the Sailor.

The name of this wonderful person, as the Sailor learned in the course of the next two days, was Mr. Esme Horrobin. He had been formerly a fellow and tutor of Gamaliel College, Oxford; he let out much pertaining to himself in the most casual way in an exegesis which was yet so neutral that it seemed to be more than wisdom itself. Also he did not shrink from impartial consideration of an act which circumstances had imposed upon him.

"It was one’s duty to resign, I assure you." As the enchanted hours passed, the discourse of the Sybarite grew more intimate, so rapt and so responsive was the young man with the deep eyes in his elemental simplicity. "It was most trying to have to leave one’s warm bed in the middle of winter at eight o’clock, to breakfast hastily, merely for what? Merely to sustain an oaf from the public schools in a death grapple with an idyll of Theocritus. There’s a labor of Sisyphus for you. We Horrobins are an old race; who knows what mysteries we have profaned in the immortal past! I hope I make myself clear."

Mr. Horrobin was not making himself at all clear, but the Sailor was striving hard to keep track of him. The Sybarite, a creature of intuitions when in the full enjoyment of "his personal ethos," was ready to help him to do so.

"We Horrobins are what is called in the physical world born-tired. We are as incapable of continuous effort as a dram drinker is of total abstinence. This absurd cosmos of airships and automobiles bores us to tears. A mere labor of Sisyphus, I assure you, my dear fellow. The whole human race striving to get to nowhere as fast as it can in order to return as quickly as possible. And why? I will tell you. Man himself has profaned the mysteries. The crime of Prometheus is not yet expiated on our miserable planet. Take my own case. I am fit for one thing only, and that is to lie in bed smoking good tobacco with my books around me, translating the 'Satyricon' of Petronius Arbiter. It seems an absurd thing to say, but given the bed, the tobacco, the books, and the right conjunction of the planetary bodies, which in these matters is most essential, and I honestly believe I am able to delve deeper into the matchless style of Petronius than any other person living or dead."

The Sailor was awed. The "Satyricon" of Petronius Arbiter was whole worlds away from Miss Fordal.

"Whether I shall ever finish my translation is not of the slightest importance. Personally, I am inclined to think not. That is one’s own private labor of Sisyphus. It won me a fellowship and ultimately lost it me. Let us assume that I finish it. There is not a publisher or an academic body in Europe or America that would venture to publish it. Rome under Nero, my dear fellow, the feast of Trimalchio. And assuming it is finished and assuming it is published, it will be a thing entirely without value, either human or commercial. And why? Because there is no absolute canon of literary style existing in the world. It is one labor of Sisyphus the more for a man to say this is Petronius to a world for whom Petronius can never exist. Do I make myself clear?"

The Sailor was silent, but round eyes of wonder were trained upon the blue-eyed, yellow-bearded face of Mr. Esme Horrobin. The Sybarite, agreeably alive to the compliment, sighed deeply.

"It may have been right to resign one’s fellowship, yet one doesn’t say it was. It may not have been right, yet one doesn’t say it was not. At least, a fellowship of Gamaliel in certain of its aspects is better than bear-leading the aristocracy, and a person of inadequate resources is sometimes driven even to that."

The next morning, the Sailor retrieved his bag from the cloak room at Marylebone Station, to which he went by bus from Victoria without much difficulty. He felt wonderfully better for his day’s rest, and much fortified by the society of Mr. Esme Horrobin. Friendship had always been precious to Henry Harper. There was something in his nature that craved for it, yet he had never been able to satisfy the instinct easily. But this inspired muffin eater opened up a whole world of new and gorgeous promise now that he had Aladdin’s lamp to read him by. Mr. Esme Horrobin was what Klondyke would have called a high-brow. But he was something more. He was a man who had the key to many hidden things.

When the Sailor had brought his bag to Bowdon House, the first thing he did was to find Marlow’s Dictionary. Miss Foldal had presented him with her own private copy of this invaluable work, and the name Gwladys Foldal was to be seen on the flyleaf. "Ethos" was the first word he looked up, but it was not there. He then sought "oaf," whose definition was fairly clear. Then he went on to "bear-leading" and to "aristocracy." These proved less simple. Their private meanings were plain, more or less, but to correlate them was beyond the Sailor’s powers, nor did it fall within the scope of Marlow’s Dictionary to explain what the Sybarite meant when he spoke of bear-leading the aristocracy.

II

Henry Harper’s acquaintance with Mr. Esme Horrobin had important consequences. That gentleman’s interest deepened almost to a mild liking for the young man. He was a type new to the Sybarite; and he might have taken pleasure in his primitive attitude to life had it been possible for such a developed mind to take pleasure in anything.

The company at Bowdon House was certainly mixed, but Mr. Esme Horrobin was a miracle of courtesy to all with whom he came in contact. He had a smile and a nod for a bricklayer’s laborer, a bus conductor out of a billet, a decayed clerk or a reformed pickpocket. No matter who they were, his charming manners intrigued them, but also kept them at their distance. When he fell into the language of democracy, which he sometimes did for his own amusement, it was always set off by an access of the patrician to his general air. By this simple means he maintained the balance of power in the body politic. He had grasped the fact that every man is at heart a snob. Even the young man who had followed the sea accepted Mr. Esme Horrobin’s estimate of Mr. Esme Horrobin.

Indeed, the Sailor was absorbing Mr. Esme Horrobin at every pore. He felt it to be a liberal education to sit at the same table, and when he went to his cubicle there were at least half a dozen carefully remembered words to look up in Marlow’s Dictionary. But it would not do to linger in the land of the lotus. He must find a means of earning a living.

It occurred to the Sailor on the morning of his third day at Bowdon House, that he might ask Mr. Horrobin for a little advice on the matter. But he did not find it easy to do so. The young man was very shy. It was one thing to listen to Mr. Horrobin, but quite another to talk to him. However, after tea on the third evening, when no one was by, he screwed up courage and boldly asked whether Mr. Horrobin knew of a billet for a chap who didn’t mind hard work, or how such a thing could be obtained.

Frankly Mr. Horrobin did not. It was the first time in his life that he had been met by any such problem. The problem for Mr. Horrobin had always been of a very different kind. His tone seemed to express the unusual when he asked the young man if he had any particular form of occupation in view.

"I’d like something to do with literature, sir," said Henry Harper, venturing timidly upon a new word.

"Ah." Mr. Horrobin scratched a yellow-whiskered chin. It was very ironical that a young man who had asked whether he read Dickens should now seek advice upon such a matter.

"Do you mean reading literature, my dear fellow, writing literature, or selling literature?"

The young man explained very simply that it was the selling of literature he had in mind.

"Ah," said Mr. Esme Horrobin gravely. But he had a kind heart. And if he really took to a person, which he very seldom did, he had the sort of disposition that is mildly helpful. And he had taken to this young man, therefore he felt inclined to do what he could for him.

Mr. Horrobin rolled and lit a cigarette. After five minutes' hard thought inspiration came. Its impact was almost dramatic, except that in no circumstances was Mr. Esme Horrobin ever dramatic.

"I really think," he said, "I must give you a line to Rudge, my bookseller, in the Charing Cross Road. He is a man who might help you; at least he may know a man who might help you. Yes, a little line to Rudge. Pray remind me tomorrow."

The young man was filled with gratitude. But he allowed his hopes to run too high. Even a little line to Rudge the bookseller was not a thing to compass in this offhand way. Tomorrow in the mouth of Mr. Esme Horrobin was a very comprehensive term. It was Tomorrow that he was going to complete his translation of the "Satyricon" of Petronius; it was Tomorrow that he would return to the world in which he was born; it was Tomorrow that he would rise earlier and forswear the practice of smoking and reading in bed. Therefore, with the promised letter to Rudge the bookseller burning a hole in his mind the young man spent a very anxious tomorrow waiting for Mr. Esme Horrobin to emerge from his cubicle.

"No use asking for Mr. Orrobin," he was told finally by the groom of the chambers, a man old and sour and by nature the complete pessimist. "It’s one of his days in bed. He’ll not put his nose outside his cubicle until tea time."

That discreet hour was on the wane before Mr. Horrobin was to be seen at work with a kettle, a caddy, and a toasting fork. Even then he was in such conversational feather that it was nearly three hours later before the young man was able to edge in a timid reminder.

"I have not forgotten," said Mr. Horrobin, all charm and amenity. "But remind me tomorrow. I will write most gladly to Rudge. He is quite a good fellow."

The Sailor grew desperate. It seemed impossible to live through a second tomorrow of this kind.

"If I get a bit of paper and an envelope and a pen and ink, will you have any objection to writing the letter now, sir?"

"My dear fellow"--the grace notes were languid and delicate--"I shall be delighted. But why tonight? It hardly seems worth while to trouble about it tonight."

But the young man rose from the common room table with almost a sensation of fear upon him, and ran to his cubicle, where all the materials for a little line to Rudge the bookseller had been in readiness since eight o’clock that morning.

Mr. Horrobin smiled when they were brought to him, a smile half weariness, half indulgent patronage. Even then it was necessary to consume two more cigarettes before he could take the extreme course of addressing Rudge the bookseller. Finally, he was addressed as follows:

Mr. Esme Horrobin presents his compliments to Mr. Rudge, and will be glad if he can find employment on his staff, or on that of any bookselling friends, for the bearer, whom he will find clean, respectful, obliging, and anxious to improve himself.

The letter was composed with much care and precision, and written in a hand of such spiderlike elegance as hardly to be legible, notwithstanding that every "t" was crossed and every comma in its place. Then came the business of sealing it. Mr. Horrobin produced a tiny piece of red sealing wax from some unsuspected purlieu of himself; a prelude to a delicately solemn performance with a wax vesta, which he took from a silver box at the end of his watch chain, and a signet ring which he gracefully removed from a finger of his right hand.

III

The next morning, before nine o’clock, armed with a red-sealed document addressed in a kind of ultra-neat Chinese, "To Mr. Rudge, Bookseller, Charing Cross Road," the Sailor set out upon one phase the more of an adventurous life.

It was not easy to find the Charing Cross Road, and when even he had done so, Mr. Rudge was not there. Booksellers were in abundance on both sides of the street. Mr. Hogan was there, Messrs. Cook and Hunt, Messrs. Lewis and Grieve; in fact, there were booksellers by the score, but Mr. Rudge was not of these. In the end, however, patience was rewarded. There was a tiny shop on the right near the top of the long street, which bore the magic name on its front in letters so faded as to be almost undecipherable.

Only one person was in the shop, a small and birdlike man to whom Henry Harper presented Mr. Horrobin’s letter. The recipient was apparently impressed by it.

"Mr. Horrobin, I see," said Mr. Rudge the bookseller—​the small and birdlike man was not less than he—​in a tone of reverence as he broke the seal.

A man of parts, Mr. Rudge was proud of an acquaintance which might almost be considered non-professional. When out of funds, Mr. Horrobin would sell Mr. Rudge a classic at a very little below its original cost, and when in funds would buy it back at a price somewhat less than that at which he had sold it. Mr. Rudge did not gain pecuniarily by the transaction, but in the course of the deal Mr. Horrobin would discourse so charmingly upon the classics in general that Mr. Rudge felt it was as good as a lecture at the Royal Institution. Although not a scholar himself in the academic sense, he had a ripe regard for those who were. In the mind of his bookseller, Mr. Horrobin stood for Culture with a very large letter.

Mr. Rudge was not in urgent need of an assistant. But he had felt lately that he would like one. He was getting old. It seemed a special act of grace that Mr. Horrobin should have sent him this young man.

Perhaps it was Mr. Rudge’s reverence for Mr. Horrobin which committed him to a bold course. It was stretching a point, but Mr. Horrobin was Mr. Horrobin, and in the special circumstances it seemed the part of homage for pure intellect to do what he could for the bearer. Thus, after a few minutes' consideration of the matter, Henry Harper was engaged at a salary of twenty-five shillings a week to be in attendance at the shop from eight till seven, and eight till two Saturdays.

This was a stroke of real luck. A special providence had seemed to watch over the Sailor ever since he had left the Margaret Carey. The situation that had been offered was exactly the one he would have chosen. The mere sight of a shop crammed with treasures ancient and mysterious was like a glimpse of an enchanted land. The previous day he had bought a copy of the "Arabian Nights" for a shilling. Such facility had he now gained in reading that he had dipped into its pages with a sharp sense of delight. No. 249, Charing Cross Road, was a veritable Cave of the Forty Robbers.

These endless rows of shelves were magic casements opening on fairyland. The Sailor felt that the turning point of his life had come. A cosmos of new worlds was spread before him now. Moreover, it was his to enter and enjoy.

He had come, as it seemed, miraculously, upon a period of expansion and true growth. His duties in the shop were light. This was one of those quiet businesses that offer many intervals of leisure. Also Mr. Rudge, as became one with a regard for the things of the mind, gave his assistant a chance "to improve himself" in accordance with Mr. Horrobin’s suggestion. Perhaps that happy and fortunate phrase had a great deal to do with the new prosperity. Mr. Rudge had been flattered by such a request coming from a man of such distinction; he felt he must live up to it by allowing Henry Harper to improve himself as much as possible.

The Sailor had entered Elysium. But he had the good sense to walk warily. He knew now that it was over-reading, the danger against which Ginger had solemnly warned him, that had brought about the Blackhampton catastrophe. He must always be on his guard, yet now the freedom was his of all these magic shelves, it was by no means easy to stick to that resolve.

Mr. Rudge dwelt at the back of the shop. Most of his time was passed in a small, dark, and stuffy sitting-room, where he ate his meals and applied himself to Culture at every reasonable opportunity. Now that he had an assistant, he was able to bestow more time than ever upon the things of the mind. He spent half his days and half his nights taking endless notes, in a meticulous hand, for a great work he had conceived forty-two years ago when he had migrated from Birmingham to the metropolis. This magnum opus was to be called "A History of the World," and was to consist of forty volumes, with a supplementary volume as an index, making forty-one in all. Each was to have four hundred and eighty pages, which were to be divided into twenty-four chapters. There were to be no illustrations.

Four decades had passed since the golden hour in which this scheme was born. In a spare room above the shop were a number of large tin trunks full of notes for the great work, all very carefully coded and docketed. These were the fruits of forty-two years' amazing industry. Every year these labors grew more comprehensive, more unceasing. But the odd thing was that only the first sentence of the first volume of the opus was yet in being. It ran, "'In the beginning,' says Holy Writ, 'was the Word.'" And even that pregnant sentence had yet to be put on paper. At present, it lay like the text of the History itself, in the head of the author.

With Henry Harper to mind the shop, the historian was able to devote more time to the work of his life. This was a fortunate matter, because Mr. Rudge was already within a few months of seventy, and forty volumes and an index had yet to be written. As a fact, considerable portions of the index were already in existence; and during Henry Harper’s first week in the front shop it received a valuable accession in the form of "Bulrushes, Vol. IX., pp. 243-245. Moses in, Vol. III., p. 120." Careful and voluminous notes upon Bulrushes, based upon an unknown work that had lately arrived in a consignment of second-hand books from Sheffield, went to line the bottom of yet another large trunk which had been added recently to the attic above the shop.

IV

The day soon came when Henry Harper said good-by to Mr. Horrobin and Bowdon House. Mr. Rudge took a fancy to him from the first. It may have been his high credentials partly; no one could have been equipped with a better start in life than the imprimatur of such a scholar and such a gentleman as Mr. Esme Horrobin. But at the same time there was much to like in the young man himself. He was diligent and respectful and his heart was in his work; also, and perhaps this counted more with Mr. Rudge than anything else, he was very anxious to improve himself. And Mr. Rudge, who was an altruist as well as a lover of Culture, was very anxious to improve him.

Sometimes Mr. Rudge had a feeling of loneliness, notwithstanding the immense labor to which he had dedicated his life. This was due in a measure to the fact that a nephew he had adopted had taken a sudden distaste for the Charing Cross Road, and had now been twelve months at sea. A bedroom he had occupied above the shop was vacant; and the use of it was presently offered to Henry Harper.

The young man accepted it gratefully. It was one more rare stroke of luck; he was now free to dwell in the land of faerie all day and all night. It seemed as if this was to be a golden time.

In a sense it was. Aladdin’s lamp was fed continually and kept freshly trimmed. The Sailor began to make surprising progress in his studies, and his kind master, when not too completely absorbed in his own titanic labors after supper, would sometimes help him. In fact, it was Mr. Rudge who first introduced him to grammar. Klondyke had never mentioned it. Miss Foldal had never mentioned it. Mr. Horrobin had never mentioned it. Mr. Rudge it was who first brought grammar home to Henry Harper.

Reading was important, said Mr. Rudge, also writing, also arithmetic, but these things, excellent in themselves, paled in the presence of grammar. You simply could not do without it. He could never have planned his "History of the World" in forty volumes excluding the index, let alone have prepared a concrete foundation for such a work, without a thorough knowledge of this science. It was the key to all Culture, and Culture was the crown of all wisdom.

On the shelves of the shop were several works on the subject. And Mr. Rudge soon began to spare an hour after supper every night from his own labors, in order that Henry Harper might acquire the key to the higher walks of mental experience.

The young man took far less kindly to grammar than he did to reading, writing, arithmetic, or even geography, which Miss Foldal considered one of the mere frills of erudition. He could see neither rhyme nor reason in this new study; but Mr. Rudge assured him it was so important that he felt bound to persevere.

Moreover, these efforts brought their reward. They kept him certain hours each day from the things for which he had a passion, so that when he felt he could turn to them again his delight was the more intense.

The books he read were very miscellaneous, but Mr. Rudge had too broad a mind to exercise a censorship. In his view, as became a bookseller pur sang, all books were good, but some were better than others.

For instance, works of the imagination were less good than other branches of literature. In Volume XXXIX of the "History of the World" a chapter was to be devoted to Shakespeare, pp. 260-284, wherein homage would be paid to a remarkable man, but it would be shown that the adulation lavished upon one who relied so much on imagination was out of all proportion to that received by Hayden, the author of the "Dictionary of Dates." Without that epoch-making work the "History of the World" could not have been undertaken.

Ill-assorted the Sailor’s reading might be, but this was a time of true development. Day by day Aladdin’s lamp burned brighter. There was little cause to regret Blackhampton, dire tragedy as his flight must ever be. When he had been a fortnight with Mr. Rudge he tried to write Ginger a letter.

To begin it, however, was one thing; to complete it another. It seemed so light and callous in comparison with his depth of feeling that he tore it up. He was disgraced forever in the sight of Ginger and his peers.

Therefore he decided to write to Miss Foldal instead. But when he took pen in hand, somehow he lost courage. He could have no interest for her now. It would be best to forget Blackhampton, to put it, if possible, out of his life.

Still he felt rather lonely sometimes. Mr. Rudge was wonderfully kind, but he lived in a world of his own. And the only compensations Henry Harper now had for the crowded epoch of Blackhampton were the books in the shop which he devoured ravenously, and the daily visits of the charlady, Mrs. Greaves.

For many years she had been the factotum of Mr. Elihu Rudge. Every morning she made his fire, cooked his meals, swept and garnished his home, and "did for him" generally. She was old, thin, somber and battered, and she had the depth of a bottomless abyss.

Mrs. Greaves was a treasure. Mr. Rudge depended upon her in everything. She was an autocrat, but women of her dynamic power are bound to be. She despised all men, frankly and coldly. In the purview of Mrs. Caroline Agnes Greaves, man was a poor thing. Woman who could get round him, who could walk over him, who could set him up and put him down, merely allowed him to take precedence in order that she might handle him to better advantage. She had a great contempt for an institution that was no "use any way," and to this law of nature it was not to be expected that "a nine pence to the shilling" creature like Mr. Henry Harper would provide an exception.

V

One evening the Sailor made a discovery. At first, however, he was far from grasping what it meant. Like many things intimately concerned with fate, it seemed a trivial and commonplace matter. It was presently to change the current of his life, but it was not until long after the change was wrought that he saw the hand of destiny.

After a week of delight he turned the last page of "Vanity Fair" by the famous author, William Makepeace Thackeray, the rival and contemporary of Charles Dickens, the author of the "Pickwick Papers." It was within a few minutes of midnight, and as Mr. Rudge, engaged upon copious notes of the life of Charles XII of Sweden, made no sign of going to bed, Henry Harper determined to allow himself one more hour.

Therefore he took a candle and entered the front shop with a sense of adventure. First he put back "Vanity Fair," Volume II, on its shelf, and then raising his candle on high, with the eagle glance of stout Cortez, he surveyed all the new worlds about him. With a thrill of joy he stood pondering which kingdom he should enter. Should it be "The Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin, which his master said was an important work and had been laid under contribution for the History? Should it be the "Queens of England," by Agnes Strickland, also several times to be quoted in the History? Or should it be Volume CXLI of Brown’s Magazine, 2_s._ 9_d._, re-bound with part of the July number missing?

By pure chance the choice fell upon Brown’s Magazine, incomplete as it was, and in its outward seeming entirely commonplace. He took the volume from its shelf, beat the dust out of it, and carried it into the sitting-room.

He began to read at the first page. This happened to be the opening of a serial story, "The Adventures of George Gregory; A Tale of the High Seas," by Anon. And the tale proved so entrancing that that night the young man did not go to bed until it was nearly time to get up again.

Without being aware of it he had found his kingdom. Here were atmosphere and color, space and light. Here was the life he had known and realized, set forth in the vicarious glory of the printed page. For many days to come he could think of little save "The Adventures of George Gregory." This strange tale of the high seas, over which his master shook his head sadly when it was shown to him, declaring it to be a work of the imagination and therefore of very small account, had a glamour quite extraordinary for Henry Harper. It brought back the Margaret Carey and his years of bitter servitude. It conjured up Mr. Thompson and the Chinaman, the Old Man and the Island of San Pedro. With these august shades raised again in the mind of the Sailor, "The Adventures of George Gregory" gained an authority they could not otherwise have had. In many of its details the story was obviously inaccurate. Sometimes Anon made statements about the Belle Fortune, the name of the ship, and the Pacific Isles, upon one of which it was wrecked, that almost made Henry Harper doubt whether George Gregory had ever been to sea at all. However, he soon learned that it was his duty to crush these unworthy suspicions and to yield entirely to the wonderful feast of incident spread before him.

Charles Dickens, and even W. M. Thackeray, for all his knowledge of the world, were poor things compared with Anon. It was a real misfortune that the part of the July number of Brown’s Magazine which was missing contained an installment of "The Adventures," but there was no help for it. Moreover, having realized the fact, the gift of the gods, Aladdin’s lamp, came to the assistance of the Sailor.

With the help of the magic talisman it was quite easy to fill in the missing part which contained the adventures of poor George when marooned, not on the Island of San Pedro, but on an island in the southern seas. There would certainly be serpents, and for that reason he would have to keep out of the trees; and although the July number was not able to supply the facts, once you had Aladdin’s lamp it was a very simple matter to make good the omission.

One thing leads to another. "The Adventures of George Gregory," imperfect as they were, fastened such a grip on the mind of Henry Harper, that one dull Monday afternoon in March, when he sat in the shop near the oil-stove waiting for an infrequent customer, a great thought came to him. Might it not be possible to improve upon George Gregory with the aid of the talisman and his own experience?

It was a very daring thought, but he was sustained in it by the conclusion to which he had come: the work of Anon, exciting and ingenious as it certainly was, was not the high seas as the Sailor had once envisaged them. The color, the mystery, the discomfort, the horror were not really there. Even the marooning of poor George upon the Island of Juan Fernandez did not thrill your blood as it ought to have done. True, it could be urged that the part containing the episode was missing; but in no case would it have been possible to equal in horror and intensity the marooning of Sailor upon the Island of San Pedro with serpents in every tree around him, although with equal truth it might be urged by the skeptical that the incident never took place at all.

"Never took place at all!" lisped Aladdin’s lamp in magic syllables. "Pray, what do you mean? It certainly took place in your experience, and in the opinion of your learned master who is writing a history of the world in forty volumes, that is the only thing that matters."

A flash of the talisman was soon to raise a bottle of ink and a quire of foolscap. Therefore one evening after supper, Mr. Rudge, still at Charles XII of Sweden, was startled painfully when "The Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas," by Henry Harper, Chapter One, was shown to him. It was a fall, but his master was too kind to say so. These misspent hours could have been used for a further enrichment of the mind. He might have added to his knowledge of grammar. He might have ventured upon the study of shorthand itself, a science of which Mr. Rudge never ceased to deplore his own ignorance. However, he said nothing, and went on with the great work.

Thus, not realizing the true feelings of his master, the young man continued to supplement the entrancing but incomplete "Adventures of George Gregory" with his own experience. The strange tale grew at the back of the genie who tended the lamp, and with it grew the soul of Henry Harper. In this new and wonderful realm he had entered it seemed that the Sailor had surely found his kingdom. Deep down in himself were latent faculties which he had not known were there. They were now springing forth gloriously into the light.

All his life he had been a dreamer of dreams; now the power was his of making them come true, he had a world of his own in which to live. He was only half awake as yet to the world around him; and this arrest of growth was for a time his weakness and his strength. It is impossible, it is said, to touch pitch and not be defiled. The worth of that aphorism was about to be tried by the clairvoyant soul of Henry Harper.

At this time, while he was drawing very painfully and yet rapturously upon his inner life, he was like an expanding flower. All his leisure was not spent in the back parlor at No. 249, Charing Cross Road. There were hours when he walked abroad into the streets of the great city.

Much was hidden from his eyes as yet. The truth was it was not his own great city in which he walked. He gazed and saw, listened and heard in a mirage of fanciful ignorance. A life of unimaginable squalor and hardship had not been able to slay the genie sleeping in that elemental soul. But it had yet to get its range of values in the many worlds around it.

One Sunday morning in the spring, in one of his enchanted walks about the city in the pursuit of knowledge, he chanced to enter Hyde Park. It was the hour when the churches of the neighborhood disgorged their fashionable congregations. Here, as he sat near the statue of Achilles and watched the brilliant throng pass by, a feeling of awe and bewilderment overcame him. He had never realized before that his fellow occupants of the planet could be so wonderful. Here was a significance, a beauty, a harmony of aspect beyond anything he had imagined to be possible. The fine-ladyhood of Miss Foldal was nothing in comparison with that queening it all around him. Even the quality of Mr. Esme Horrobin paled in luster. This was a very remarkable world into which he had strayed. He had almost a sense of guilt at finding himself there. With such clothes as he wore and such a humility of heart as he had, he had clearly no right of entry to this paradise. But there he was with every nerve alive, and the scene burned itself vividly into his heart and brain.

These gorgeous beings with their kingliness of mien, these children of the sun who spoke with the accent of the gods meant much more to the primitive soul of Henry Harper than as yet it could understand. In the intoxication of the hour, with the sun and the birds, the trees, the green earth, the bright flowers paying their homage to the grace and beauty of his countrywomen, he felt like an angel who has fallen out of heaven, who after aeons of time in a bottomless hell is permitted to see again a fair heritage that once was his.

The genie had unlocked another door. Henry Harper was now in a world of romance. In order to know what these wonderful beings truly were he listened eagerly for fragments of their talk as they passed by. All of a sudden there came miraculously a voice that had a tang of ocean in it. There and then was he flung out of Hyde Park to the deck of the Margaret Carey.

Leaping at the sound of a laugh, a full-chested music the Sailor could never forget, he saw, a few yards off, the oncoming figures of a man and a girl. Both were tall and young and splendid; both seemed to be dressed in the last cry of fashion. Moreover they bore themselves with the assured grace of a sweet ship under canvas.

The pair were clearly brother and sister, and the figure of the man, at least, was extraordinarily familiar to Henry Harper. Yet almost before he had realized them, they were level with him. It was not until they were actually past the seat on which he sat that there came a flash of recognition. The man was Klondyke.

For an instant the heart of the Sailor stood still. The immortal had almost touched his knee, yet he was yards away already. But Klondyke it was, laughing his great note and rolling out his rich and peculiar dialect. It was Klondyke in a top hat and a tail coat, looking as if he had come out of a bandbox. Who could believe that such faultless magnificence had been washed habitually out of its berth in the half-deck of the Margaret Carey?

He did not look a bit older than when the Sailor had seen him last, that unhappy six years ago when his friend shook him by the hand, told him to stick to his reading and writing, and then started to walk across Asia. And in that time Klondyke did not appear to have changed at all. He had the same brown, large-featured face, the same keen and cheerful eye, the same roll in his gait, and that cool, indefinable, you-be-damned air that was both admired and resented aboard the Margaret Carey.

By the time the Sailor had recovered from his surprise, Klondyke was out of sight. A strong impulse then came upon Henry Harper to go after his friend and declare himself. But a feeling of timidity defeated him. Besides, he understood more fully at this moment than ever before that there were whole continents between such a man as Klondyke and such a man as Henry Harper.

VI

The emotions of the Sailor were many and conflicting as he made his way back to Charing Cross Road to the homely meal which Mrs. Greaves provided for his master and himself. A long afternoon and evening followed in which Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior roamed the high seas.

Infinite pains had now brought the narrative to Chapter Six. But for some days progress was very slow. The figure of Klondyke held the thoughts of the Sailor. Surely it was cowardice not to have made himself known. It was treason to assume that his friend, in spite of the wonderful girl by his side, would not have been glad to see him again. Yet was it? That was the half formed fear which tormented him. Klondyke had forgotten his existence: so much was clear because he had almost touched his knee as he went by. And why should he remember him? Who was he that he should be remembered by such a man as Klondyke? The tale of the high seas had a bad week. The Sailor was held in thrall by an emanation from the past. How Klondyke would have roared had he known what he was at! Somehow it set the blood tingling in Henry Harper’s ears to reflect that it was he who a few brief years ago had first introduced him to reading and writing.

Do as he would, it was not a propitious hour for the story of Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior. And when the next Sunday came he had to decide whether or not to go to Hyde Park in the hope of seeing the immortal. Finally, in a state of utter misgiving, he went. This time, although he sat a long hour on a seat near the statue of Achilles, there was never a sign of him. Yet he was content to be disappointed, for the longer he sat the more clearly he knew that cowardice would defeat him again should Klondyke and his attendant nymph appear.

Henry Harper was coming now to a phase in which ladies were to play their part. Mrs. Greaves had a niece, it seemed. From brilliant accounts furnished from time to time he learned that she was a strikingly gifted creature, not only endowed with beauty, but also with brains in a very high degree.

"Miss Cora Dobbs," in the words of her aunt, "was an actress by profession, and she had done so well in it that she had a flat of her own round the corner in the Avenue. Toffs as understood Cora’s merit thought 'ighly of her talent. She could dance and she could sing, and she earned such good money that she had a nest-egg put by."

Henry Harper was at first too absorbed in his work to pay much attention to the charlady’s discourses upon her niece. Besides, had he not known Miss Gwladys Foldal who had played in Shakespeare and been admitted to an intimacy of a most intellectual kind? The indifference of Mr. Harper seemed to pique Mrs. Greaves. She often recurred to the subject of Miss Dobbs; moreover, she seemed anxious for the young man to realize that "although she was the niece of one as didn’t pretend to be anythink, Cora herself was a lady."

Such statements were not really necessary. In the eyes of Mr. Harper every woman was a lady more or less, even if to that rule there must always be one signal exception. He had a deep-rooted chivalry for Mrs. Greaves' sex. He even treated her, flat-chested, bearded and ferret-like as she was, with an instinctive courtesy which she at once set down as weakness of character.

For a reason Mr. Harper did not try to fathom—​just now he was far too deep in his task to give much thought to the matter—​Mrs. Greaves seemed most anxious that he should make the acquaintance of Miss Cora Dobbs. One reason, it is true, she gave. "Mr. Arper was a snail as was too much in his shell. He wanted a bright and knowing girl like Cora to tote him around a bit and teach him not to be afraid of life."

Mrs. Greaves had such a contempt for Mr. Harper’s sex that her solicitude was rather strange. As for its two specimens for whom she "did" daily, the emotion they inspired was one of deadly cynicism. In her razor-like judgment they were as soft as pap. It was therefore the more remarkable that she should now take such an interest in the welfare of the younger man.

What was he writing? Lips of cautious curiosity were always asking the question. A book! She was greatly interested in books and had always been since she had "done" for a gentleman who got fifty pounds for every one that he wrote. What did Mr. Harper expect to get by it?

It had not occurred to Mr. Harper that he would get anything by it.

"Why write it then?" she asked with acrid surprise. Why get up so early and sit up so late? Why use all that good ink and expensive paper if he didn’t expect to get something out of it?

The young man was writing it because he felt he must.

"I sometimes think you must be a reg’lar soft-biled un," said Mrs. Greaves, with an air of personal affront. "I do, honest. Wasting your time like that …​ and mine as well!"

At that moment, however, the Sailor was far too deep in Chapter Eighteen to attend to the charlady. His total lack of interest sent her in a huff to the back kitchen. Yet she was not cast down altogether. He was more of a half-bake than she had guessed, that was all.

VII

Next morning a lady walked into the shop. She was tall and stout, beaming and fashionable. The first detail of a striking, even resplendent personality which caught the young man’s eye was her boots. These were long, narrow, perilously high in the heel, they had black and white checked uppers, and a pair of fat feet had been buttoned into them.

"I want 'Etiquette for Ladies,' please. It’s in the window. A shilling. Yellow cover."

It was not the voice the young man had heard in Hyde Park, nor was it the voice of Miss Foldal; on the contrary, it was direct, searching, rather aggressive in quality. There was ease and confidence in it, there was humor and archness. It was a voice of hyper-refinement, of Miss Foldal receiving company, raised to a higher, more dominant power.

"Yes, that’s the one. By a Member of the Aristocracy. At least it says it is. And if it isn’t, I get my money back, don’t I?"

The flash of teeth and the smile that followed startled the young man considerably. He blushed to the roots of his hair. This was a new kind of lady altogether and he didn’t know in the least how he was going to cope with her.

"Thanks very much." Elegantly the sum of one shilling was disbursed from a very smart reticule.

That, however, was not the conclusion of the incident.

"Excuse me," said the lady, "but you are Mr. Harper, aren’t you?"

Blushing again he admitted very humbly that he was.

"Yes, you look clever. I’m Cora Dobbs. You know Auntie, I think."

With a blush deepening to a hue that was quite nice the young man said he knew Miss Dobbs' aunt.

"She’s a rum one, isn’t she?" The sudden friendliness was overpowering.

The young man, not knowing what to say, said nothing. Thus far he had been on the high seas with Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior, but he was quickly coming to dry land, to London, to the Charing Cross Road. So this was the niece of whom Mrs. Greaves thought so much. Henry Harper could understand the charlady’s pride in her, but it was very surprising that she should be the niece of Mrs. Greaves. She was something totally different. In manner she was even more refined than Miss Foldal herself, although in some ways she had a slight resemblance to his good fairy. But Miss Dobbs had a candor, a humor and a charm quite new in Henry Harper’s very limited social experience. She was really most agreeable; also her clothes, if not exactly Hyde Park, were so fine that they must have cost a great deal of money.

So much for Miss Dobbs in the sight of Mr. Harper. As for Mr. Harper in the sight of Miss Dobbs, that was a very different matter. He was not bad looking; he was tall, well-made, clean, his eyes were good. But their queer expression could only mean that he was as weak as water and as green as grass. Evidently he hardly knew he had come on to the earth. Also he was as shy as a baby and his trousers wanted ironing badly.

"I have heard quite a lot about you, Mr. Harper, from my aunt."

It was a little surprising that a creature so fashionable should own an aunt so much the reverse. Even Mr. Harper, who had hardly begun to get a sense of perspective, felt the two ladies were as wide asunder as the poles. Not of course that Mrs. Greaves was an "ordinary" char, he had her own assurance of that. She was a kind of super-charlady who "did" for barristers and professional gentlemen, cooked their meals, supervised their bachelor establishments, and allowed them to share her pride in a distinguished niece.

Had Mr. Harper been a more sophisticated young man he must have felt the attitude of the niece to be admirable. There was not a shade of false shame when she spoke of her aunt. Miss Cora Dobbs was too frankly of the world to suffer any vicarious embarrassment. She was amused with a relationship thrust upon her by an ironical providence, and that was all.

"I hear you are writing a book."

That was a false move. Mr. Harper was only able to blush vividly and to make a kind of noise at the back of his throat.

"I have a great friend who is writing one." Miss Dobbs hastened to repair a tactical mistake. "Hers is reminiscences. I am helping with a few of mine. I dare say Auntie has told you I have been on the stage?"

Mr. Harper had been told that.

"Don’t you think it’s a good idea? My friend gives her name because she married a lord, but I’m to do the donkey work. It would be telling if I told you her name, but don’t you think it’s business?"

Mr. Harper thought, not very audibly, that it was.

"One of our girls at the Friv., Cassie Smallpiece, who married Lord Bargrave, you know…​"

"…​ Made quite a pot of money out of hers. Of course there was scandal in Cassie’s. Cassie was rather warm pastry. But there’ll be none in ours, although I expect that’ll be money out of our pockets."

Mr. Harper hoped such would not be the case.

"Bound to be," said Miss Dobbs. "That’s the worst of being a clean potato, you are always missing your share of the cake."

Mr. Harper was completely out of his depth. He had no reply to make to this very advanced remark.

Miss Dobbs watched his perplexed face with a narrow-lidded wariness, behind which glittered the eyes of a goshawk. But she was too wise to force the pace unduly. With a suddenness that was almost startling, she said, "Well, ching-a-ling. I’ll look in again when you are not so busy, Mr. Harper. One of these days perhaps you will give me advice about my reminiscences." And with a smile and a wave of her muff of excruciating friendliness, Miss Cora Dobbs gave a trip and a waddle, and the high heels and the black and white check uppers were on the pavement of the Charing Cross Road.

For at least three minutes, however, after they had gone, Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior were left in a state of suspended animation. The author had to make a great effort before he could proceed with Chapter Eighteen. A glamour had passed from the earth; at least from that part of the earth contained by the four walls of No. 249, Charing Cross Road.

VIII

Miss Cora Dobbs was as good as her word. She looked in again; indeed she formed quite a habit of looking into the shop of Elihu Rudge, bookseller, whenever she was passing. This seemed to work out on an average at one morning a week. Her reminiscences could hardly have induced this friendliness because, strange to say, she never mentioned them again.

On a first consideration, it seemed more likely due to her deep interest in the book Mr. Harper was writing, of which her aunt had told her. Whenever Miss Dobbs looked in she never failed to ask, "How is it going today?" and she declared she would not be satisfied until a chapter had been read to her.

Mr. Harper was rather embarrassed by the attentions of Miss Dobbs. He was a very shy young man, and in regard to his new and strange and sometimes extremely painful labors he was unreasonably silent. But so determined was the interest of Miss Dobbs that in the end Mr. Harper yielded to its pressure. At last he let her see the manuscript. But even that did not content her. She was set, it seemed, on having some of the choicest passages read aloud by the author when there was no one in the shop.

In a way the determination of Miss Dobbs was rather a thorn. Yet it would have been idle and ungracious for Mr. Harper to pretend that he was not flattered by this remarkable solicitude for the story of Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior. He was very flattered indeed. For one thing, Miss Dobbs was Miss Dobbs in a way that Miss Foldal had never been Miss Foldal. She was a force in the way that Ginger was; her elegance was positive, it meant something. She had a subtle air of "being out for blood," just as Ginger had when they had paid their first never-to-be-forgotten visit to Blackhampton. Deep in his heart the Sailor was a little afraid of Miss Cora Dobbs. Yet he did not know why he should be. She was extraordinarily agreeable. No one could have been pleasanter to talk to; she was by far the wittiest and most amusing lady he had ever met; it was impossible not to like her immensely; but already a subtle instinct told him to beware.

As for Miss Dobbs, her state of mind would be difficult to render. Just as Mr. Harper was very simple, Miss Dobbs was extremely complex. In the first place, there seemed no particular reason why she should have come into the shop at all. It may have been curiosity. Perhaps her aunt had aroused it by the statement that Mr. Rudge had "set up a nice-looking boy as wrote books," and it may have been that the bearing of the nice-looking boy gave warrant for a continuance of Miss Dobbs' friendly regard.

On the other hand, it may have been the nature of Mr. Harper’s calling which inspired these punctual attentions. It certainly had possibilities. Among the friends of Miss Dobbs was a certain Mr. Albert Hobson who was reputed to earn several thousands a year by his pen. Again, it may have been the statement of her aunt that the young man "had follered the sea and had a nest-egg put by." Or again it may have been the young man himself who appealed to her. His clean simplicity of mind and of mansion may have had a morbid attraction for a complexity that was pathological. Of these hypotheses the last may seem least probable, but the motives of a Miss Cora Dobbs defy analysis; and in a world in which nothing is absolute she is perhaps entitled to the benefit of any doubt that may arise concerning them.

In spite of Miss Dobbs, whose attentions for the present were confined to a few minutes one morning a week, the story of Dick Smith began to make excellent progress. All the same it was uphill work. The Sailor was a very clumsy craftsman using the queerest of tools, but oddly enough he had a remarkable faculty of concentration.

At last came the day when the final chapter was written. And a proud day it was. In spite of many defeats and misgivings, he was able at three o’clock of a summer morning to write the magic words, "The End." Yet it was far from being the end of his labors. He little knew that he had merely come to Mount Pisgah, and that for many days he must be content with no more than a glimpse of the Promised Land.

In telling the story of his early years the Sailor had no particular object in view. Certain mysterious forces were craving expression. Such a task had not been undertaken at the call of ambition. But now it was done ambition found a part to play.

On the very morning the story was finished, by an odd chance Miss Dobbs came into the shop. In answer to her invariable, "Well, what of it?" she was gravely informed that the end had been reached.

"My! you’ve been going some, Mr. R. L. Stevenson. Run along and fetch the last chapter and read it to me and then I’ll tell you honestly whether I think it’s as good as Bert Hobson."

Miss Dobbs had the habit of command. Therefore Chapter the Last, telling of the hero’s miraculous deliverance from the Island of San Pedro, was at once produced. Moreover, it was read to her with naif sincerity in a gentle voice.

"Hot stuff!" Miss Dobbs dexterously concealed a yawn with a dingy white glove. "It’s It."

The author blushed with pleasure, although he could hardly believe the story was as good as all that.

"And what are you going to do with it now you’ve written it?"

To her intense surprise it had not occurred to him to do anything with it.

"Oh, but that’s potty. That’s merely potty. Of course you are going to bring it out as a book."

The author had not thought of doing so.

"Anyhow, it is just the thing for a magazine."

Even a magazine had not entered his mind.

"What are you going to do with it, then?" demanded Miss Dobbs, with growing incredulity.

This was a question Mr. Harper was unable to answer.

"You are going to do nothing with it?" gasped Miss Dobbs.

"No."

"But it’s 'some' story, I assure you it is. If you send it to the Rotunda or the Covent Garden it may mean big money."

Quite absurdly the financial aspect had not presented itself.

"Well, you’re potty," said Miss Dobbs, with despondency. "Don’t you know that Bert Hobson, who writes those stories for the Rotunda, makes his thousands a year?"

Mr. Harper, who had never heard of Bert Hobson or of the Rotunda, seemed greatly surprised.

"Why, you are as green as green," said Miss Dobbs reproachfully. "It’s such a nugget of thrills, you ought to see that it gets published. You ought really."

But in spite of her conviction it was some time before he felt able to take her advice. Such unpractical reluctance on the part of genius gave her pain. It seemed to lower its value. He must be a genius to have written a book, but it was a great pity that he should confirm the world’s estimate of genius by behaving like one.

Why had he taken so much trouble if he was not going to get a nice fat check out of it?

He had written it because he felt he must.

It’s a very sloppy reason, was the unexpressed opinion of Miss Dobbs.

After such a hopeless admission on the part of the young man with the queer eyes, Miss Dobbs felt so hurt that she did not appear in the shop for three weeks. And when at last she came again, she learned that the story of Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior was still in its drawer and had yet to be seen by anyone.

"You beat Banagher," said Miss Dobbs. And then she suddenly exclaimed, "Look here, Mr. Harper, give me that story and I’ll send it myself to the Rotunda."

Very gently and politely, but quite firmly, Mr. Harper declined to do so. But in order to appease Miss Dobbs, who was inclined to make this refusal a personal matter, he solemnly promised that he would send it to the Rotunda himself, or some other magazine.

Henry Harper took a sudden resolve that night to send the story to the home of its only true begetter, Brown’s Magazine. Why he chose that periodical in preference to the Rotunda was more than he could say. It may have been a feeling of reverence for the dilapidated Volume CXLI with part of the July number missing. Some high instinct may have been at work since the gods must have some kind of machinery to help them in these matters. At least the material fact was beyond dispute. He packed the story that evening in neat brown paper, and before taking down the shutters of the shop the next morning, went out and posted it, although sure in his own mind that he was guilty of a foolish proceeding.

Still, there was a lady in the case. But when in the course of the following day Miss Dobbs looked in again, by some odd perversity she was inclined to share this view to the full. She had never heard of Brown’s Magazine. The Rotunda and the Covent Garden were her stand-bys. She never read anything else. But she dared say that Brown’s money would be as good as other people’s, although Brown’s Magazine certainly would not have the circulation of the Rotunda.

Several weeks passed. Miss Dobbs looked in now and again to ask if Mr. Harper had "had any luck." To this inquiry one invariable answer was given, and after a time Miss Dobbs seemed to lose something of her faith. Her interest in the story of Dick Smith and in Mr. Harper himself began to wane. She had said from the first that Brown’s was a mistake. It should have been the Rotunda or nothing. Miss Dobbs was a firm believer in beginning at the top; in her opinion it was easier to come down than it was to go up.

When the fourth week of silence on the part of Brown’s Magazine had been entered upon, she suggested that Mr. Harper should stir them up a bit. With surprising inconsequence he asked for one more week of grace. For his own part, he could not help thinking it was a good sign. Miss Dobbs did not share his view. Brown’s had either mislaid the manuscript, they had not received it, or they had destroyed it; and in a state verging upon sarcasm she withdrew from the shop with the final and crushing remark, "that Mr. Harper was a rum one, and she doubted very much whether he would ever make good."

However, Miss Dobbs, in spite of her knowledge of the world, had to admit, a week later, that Mr. Harper knew more about Brown’s Magazine than she did. For when she looked in on the morning of Saturday to inquire for news of the ill-fated Dick Smith she was met triumphantly with a letter which had come by the last post the previous evening.

With quite a thrill she took the letter out of its neatly embossed envelope and made an attempt to read the following:

12B, Pall Mall, September 2.

DEAR SIR,

Your story has now been read twice, and the conclusion very reluctantly come to by the writer is that it would be impossible to use it in Brown’s Magazine in its present form. It bears many marks of inexperience, but at the same time it has such a strikingly original quality that the writer would be very glad to have a talk with you about it. In the meantime the MS is being returned to you.

Yours very truly, EDWARD AMBROSE.

"I don’t call that writing," said Miss Dobbs, who had been utterly defeated by the hand of the editor of Brown’s Magazine. "It is just a fly walking across the paper without having wiped its feet. Read it to me, Mr. Harper."

Mr. Harper, who had spent nearly an hour the previous evening in making out the letter, and now knew it by heart, enforced her respect by reading it aloud as if it had been nothing out of the common.

"Marks of inexperience!" was her comment. "Like his impudence. I wonder who he thinks he is. You take my advice, Mr. Harper, and send it to the Covent Garden. See what they’ve got to say about it."

However, before taking that course, Henry Harper felt it would be the part of wisdom to get in touch with the real live editor who had expressed a wish to see him. Besides, there had been something in the letter signed "Edward Ambrose" which had set a chord vibrating in his heart.

IX

In order to pay a visit to 12B, Pall Mall, Henry Harper had to ask for leave. This was readily granted by his master, who was even more impressed by the letter from the editor of Brown’s Magazine than was its recipient.

As became one who had a practical acquaintance with editors and publishers, Mr. Rudge knew that for more than a century Brown’s Magazine had been a Mecca of the man of letters. Great names were enshrined in its history. These began with Byron and Scott, and flowed through the Victorian epoch to the most gifted and representative minds of the present. Mr. Ambrose himself was a critic of some celebrity; moreover, Brown’s Magazine was still half a crown a month as it always had been, so that even its subscribers had a sense of exclusiveness.

Henry Harper was so shy that when the hour came for him to set forth to 12B, Pall Mall, his one desire was to take the advice of Miss Dobbs and not pay his visit at all. But Mr. Rudge was adamant. Henry must go to Pall Mall if only for the sake of the firm. Just as the young man was about to set out, his master emphasized the immense importance of the matter by appearing on the scene, clothes brush in hand, in order to give a final touch to his toilet. No discredit must be done to 249, Charing Cross Road. An unprecedented honor had been conferred upon it.

The reception of Mr. Harper in Pall Mall was of a kind to impress a sensitive young man of high aspiration and very limited opportunity. To begin with, Pall Mall is Pall Mall, and No. 12B in every chaste external was entirely worthy of its local habitation. After a much bemedaled commissionaire of incredibly distinguished aspect had ushered the young man into the front office, he was received by a grave and reverend signior in a frock coat whom Mr. Harper instinctively felt was the editor himself. Such, however, was not the case. The grave and reverend one was a trusted member of the staff, whose duty it was to usher contributors into the Presence, and in the meantime, if delay arose, to arrange for their well-being.

Before Mr. Harper could be received, he spent some terrible minutes in a tiny waiting-room, in which he felt he was being asphyxiated. During that time it was borne in upon him that he would not be equal to the ordeal ahead. Every minute he grew more nervous. He could never face it, he was sure. Far better to have taken the advice of the wise Miss Dobbs, and have been content with the Covent Garden.

Before the fateful moment came he was in a state of despair. Why he should have been was impossible to say. What was Pall Mall in comparison with the forecastle or the futtock shrouds of the Margaret Carey? What were the commissionaire and the frock-coated gentleman in comparison with Mr. Thompson and the Old Man? Yet he came within an ace of flying out of that waiting-room into the street.

The cicerone reappeared, led the young man up a flight of stairs, opened a door, and announced, "Mr. Harper."

Seated at a writing table in a bay of the large, airy, well-appointed room, was a gravely genial man, whose face had that subtle look of power which springs from the play of mind.

He rose at once and offered a welcome of such unstudied cordiality that Henry Harper forgot that he had ever been afraid of him. The editor of Brown’s Magazine placed a chair for the young man and asked him to sit down. He then returned to his writing table, leaned back in his own chair, and half turned to face his visitor.

"Your story interested me enormously." The editor studied very closely the young man opposite without appearing to do so; and then he said, in a slightly changed tone, as if a theory previously formed had been confirmed, "I am sure you have had experience of the sea."

The Sailor knew already that he was going to like Mr. Ambrose immensely. In a subtle way he was reminded of Klondyke, and more remotely of Mr. Horrobin, but yet he felt that Mr. Ambrose was not really like them at all.

As for Edward Ambrose, he had at once fixed in his mind a picture of great simplicity, of eager intensity, of an earnestness pathetic and naif. Strange to say, it was almost exactly the one he had been able to envisage beforehand. If ever a human document had ascended to the first floor of 12B, Pall Mall, it was here before his eyes.

The Sailor began presently to forget his shyness in a surprising way. Mr. Ambrose differed from Mr. Horrobin inasmuch that he was ready, even anxious, to listen. He seemed quite eager that the Sailor should speak about himself. The story had interested him very much. He felt its power, and saw great possibilities for a talent, immature as it was, which could declare itself in a shape so definite.

After a while the Sailor talked with less reserve than perhaps he ought to have done. But such a man was very hard to resist—​impossible for certain natures. He had a faculty of perception that was very rare, he was amazingly quick to see and to appreciate; and with this curious power of realizing all that was worthy there was a knack of overlooking, of perhaps even blinding himself, to things less pleasing.

The Sailor’s speech, queer and semi-literate as it was, exactly resembled his writing. Here was something rare and strange. The shy earnestness of the voice, the neat serge suit, well tended but of poor quality, the general air of clean simplicity without and within; above all, the haunted eyes of this deep-sea mariner, which had seen so much more than they would ever be able to tell, fixed towards a goal they could never hope to attain, were much as Edward Ambrose had pictured them.

"I want to use your story," said the editor; "but please don’t be offended by what I am going to say."

The look in the face of the Sailor showed it would be quite impossible for Mr. Ambrose to offend him.

"There are little things, certain rules that have to be learned before even Genius itself can be given a hearing. And it is vital to master them. But you are so far on the road, that in a short time, if you care to go on, I am convinced you will have all the tricks of a craft which too often begins and ends in trickery and once in a lustrum rises to power. At least that’s my experience." And Mr. Ambrose laughed with charming friendliness.

"Now," he went on, "I will let you into a secret that all the world knows. We declined Treasure Island. Not in my time, I am glad to say, but Brown’s Magazine declined it. The story is told against us; and if we can we want to wipe the blot off our escutcheon. And I feel, Mr. Harper, that if you will learn the rules of the game and not lose yourself, one day you will help us to do so."

It took the editor some time to explain what he meant. But he did so at considerable length and with wonderful lucidity. The personality of this young man appealed to him. And he felt that the author of Dick Smith had had an almost superhuman task laid upon him. Here was a competitor in the Olympian games starting from a mark so far behind his peers that by all the laws he was out of the race before he started to run it. But was he? Somehow Edward Ambrose felt that if this dauntless spirit, already many times defeated, but never completely overthrown, could find the courage to go on, the world would have cause one day to congratulate Brown’s Magazine.

The editor took a cordial leave of his strange visitor. "Keep on keeping on, and see what comes of it. Don’t be afraid to use the knife, but be careful not to cut yourself. That’s the particular form of the eternal paradox assumed by the absolute for the overthrow of the writing man! It’s a riddle each must read in his own way. But instinct is the master key. Trust it as you have done already, and it will unlock every door. However, we will talk of that another time. But you might bear in mind what a great writer said to me here in this room only last week. 'When you feel anything you may have written is really fine it is a golden rule to leave it out.' Clear away a few of the trees, and then we may begin to see the wood. But this doesn’t apply to the Island of San Pedro. Not a word of that can be spared."

The Sailor walked on air as far as the National Gallery. But as he turned the corner into Charing Cross Road he was brought to earth by a violent collision with an elderly gentleman. He was not brought literally to earth because he suffered less than his victim.

Before the elderly gentleman had ceased to blaspheme the young man came within an ace of an even more emphatic reminder of earth’s realities: at the end of Cranbourn Street an omnibus nearly ran over him. Still, it is the part of charity to cover his sins, because up till then, Tuesday, September the fifth had been the day of his life.

X

This mood did not last very long. He was now up against the stern facts of authorship. The story of Dick Smith would have to be written again and written differently. In the reincarnation would be little of the creative rapture of the primal birth. And so little faith had the Sailor in his powers that he could not help feeling that too much had been asked of them.

To add to his doubts, he was beset by conflicting advice. Miss Dobbs was quite angry when she learned the result of the interview with Mr. Ambrose, which she did the day after it had taken place.

"Wants you to write it again, does he?" she said with a glow of indignation. "I call that the limit! Now, if you’ll be guided by me, Mr. Harper, which, of course, you ought to have been from the first, you’ll do nothing of the kind. Send it to the Rotunda or the Covent Garden."

Miss Dobbs was so firm and Henry Harper was so oppressed by the magnitude of his task, that he came very near taking her advice.

It was the intervention of the author of "A History of the World" in forty volumes with an index that saved the situation. Mr. Rudge was horrified when he learned that Henry Harper thought of trying his luck with the Rotunda. It was nothing less than an act of lese-majeste. There could be so little ground of comparison between that upstart and Brown’s that in the opinion of Mr. Rudge it was better to be damned by the fountain of honor, which had published Byron and Scott, than be accepted and even tricked out with illustrations—​there would be no illustrations in the "History of the World"--by a cheap and flashy parvenu which bore a similar relation to literature to that a toadstool bore to horticulture.

Miss Dobbs had force of character, but she was no match for Mr. Rudge when it came to a question of Brown’s Magazine v. the Rotunda. He even went to the length of telling her that she didn’t know what she was talking about. The grave spectacled eyes of the historian flashed to such purpose that Miss Dobbs was fain to admit "that she never would have thought the old fool had it in him." But great issues were at stake. All that he stood for was in the scale. Such an affront should only be offered to Culture over the dead body of the author of the "History of the World."

Finally, Henry Harper sat down to rewrite the story of Dick Smith and the brigantine Excelsior. As a fruit of victory, Mr. Rudge ordained that the young man should return to the study of grammar. It was more than ever necessary now. He was sure that had he been as well up in grammar as he ought to have been, the question of rewriting the story of Dick Smith could never have arisen.

These were trying days. But the Sailor stuck gallantly to his guns. In spite of the pessimism of Miss Dobbs, who still looked in now and again, he grappled with an extremely difficult task. Moreover, he did so very thoroughly. Mr. Ambrose had given him only general rules to go by; yet these, few and succinct as they were, seemed to cut into the woof and fabric of his mind.

As the days passed, and the end of Henry Harper’s labor seemed farther off than ever, Miss Dobbs grew more gloomy, but her regard for his welfare was still considerable. He might have been grateful had it become less, but he was far too chivalrous to admit such a thought. Besides, it was not a little surprising that a lady of the standing of Miss Dobbs should take an interest in such a person as himself.

One day, she invited him to tea at her flat. He must come tomorrow afternoon, to meet her great friend, Zoe Bonser, who was a Maison Perry girl, and very nice and clever. Had there been a way of evading this point-blank invitation, he would certainly have sought it. Unfortunately there was not. Before issuing her invitation Miss Dobbs had already taken the precaution of asking casually whether "he was doing anything Sunday afternoon?"

Mr. Harper grew quite alarmed as soon as he realized what he had done. The mere thought of the society of promiscuous ladies, however nice and clever, was enough to frighten him. Miss Dobbs herself, who was niceness and cleverness personified, had never really broken through the ice. They were old friends now, but even she, with all the arts of which she was mistress, had never been able to penetrate the reserve of this odd young man. If he had not been incapable of deliberately wounding the feelings of a lady who had shown him such kindness, he would have boldly refused to meet the nice and clever Miss Bonser, which with all his soul he longed to do.

Therefore, on Sunday afternoon, he sadly abandoned a chapter of Dick Smith, which was now in a tangle so hopeless that it seemed it would never come right. After infinite pains had made him as presentable as a very limited wardrobe allowed, he went to No. 106, King John’s Mansions, the whereabouts of which had already been explained to him very carefully.

Miss Dobbs' flat was right at the top of a very large, very gloomy, and very draughty building. Its endless flights of stone stairs—​there was no lift, although it was clearly a case for one—​seemed not to have been swept for a month at least. But this was in keeping with a general air of cheapness and discomfort. By the time Mr. Harper had climbed as far as No. 106, and had knocked timidly with a decrepit knocker upon an uninviting door, he was in a state of panic and dejection.

Miss Dobbs opened the door herself. As she stood on an ungarnished threshold, cigarette in hand, flashing rows of fine teeth in welcome, the young man’s first thought was how different she looked without her hat. His second thought was that its absence hardly improved her. She looked older, flatter, less mysterious. Even the fluffy and peroxidized abundance, which came low on the forehead in a quite remarkable bandeau, somehow gave a maturity to her appearance that he had not in the least expected.

Miss Dobbs had all the arts of gracious hospitality. She took his overcoat and hat away from him, and then hustled him genially into what she called her "boo-door," into the alert but extremely agreeable presence of the nice and clever Miss Bonser.

Miss Bonser was not exactly what you would call beautiful, but she had Chick—​to adopt the picturesque language of her oldest and dearest friend in rendering her afterwards to Mr. Henry Harper. She had the appearance of a thoroughly good sort, except that her eyes were so terribly wary, although hardly so wary perhaps as those of her hostess, because that would have been impossible. Still, there was Chick and refinement, and above all, great cordiality in Miss Bonser. Cordiality, indeed, was the prevailing note of No. 106, King John’s Mansions. Miss Dobbs addressed Miss Bonser as "dear," Miss Bonser addressed Miss Dobbs as "dear," and then Miss Dobbs covered Mr. Harper with confusion by suddenly and unexpectedly calling him "Harry."

"Take a pew, Harry," said Miss Dobbs.

Mr. Harper knew that he alone was intended, because no other gentleman was there. Nervously he sat down in a creaking and rickety cane chair. The "Harry" had flattered him a goodish bit, since Miss Dobbs was quite as much a lady in her home as she was out of it; also she had for a friend another lady, a very nice and clever one, with a refined voice, smart clothes, and a great amount of jewelry. She had also the air and the manners of Society, of which he had learned in the works of the famous novelist, W. M. Thackeray. The way in which Miss Bonser produced a private case and offered it to him after choosing a cigarette for herself, somehow reminded him of "Vanity Fair."

"Harry don’t smoke, do you, Harry?" said the hostess, covering Mr. Harper’s extreme confusion with rare tact and spontaneity.

Miss Dobbs then made tea, and by the time Mr. Harper had had two large and cracked cups of a weak brew and had eaten one piece of buttered cake, being too shy to eat anything else in spite of great pressure, he was able to collect himself a little.

"Cora tells me you are writing a book, Harry," said Miss Bonser conversationally.

Mr. Harper admitted this, although again startled by the Harry.

"You don’t mind, do you," said Miss Bonser, in answer to his face. "'Mister' is so formal. I’m all for being friendly and pleasant myself. What was I saying? Oh, about the book you are writing. My best boy, Bert Hobson, the novelist, makes simply pots of money. He’s got a serial running now in the Covent Garden. You’ve read it, I daresay."

It appeared that Mr. Harper had not read the story.

"Well, you ought reelly." Mr. Harper noticed that Miss Bonser pronounced the polite word "reelly" exactly as Miss Foldal did, although a much more fashionable lady in other respects than the good fairy of Blackhampton. "Start at once. Do it now. It’s Albert’s top notch." To Miss Dobbs: "Don’t you think so, dear?"

Miss Dobbs was quite of Miss Bonser’s opinion.

"What’s the name of your book?" asked Miss Bonser.

"'The Adventures of Dick Smith,'" said Mr. Harper nervously.

"It’s a very good title, don’t you think so, dear?" Miss Dobbs thought so too.

"I suppose you’ll dedicate it to Cora," said Miss Bonser, "as she has taken such an interest in it."

Mr. Harper had to admit rather shamefacedly that it had not occurred to him to do that. Miss Bonser was surprised; but Miss Dobbs said she couldn’t think of it. She didn’t look for a reward. Miss Bonser said she was sure of that, yet Mr. Harper felt very uncomfortable because it was borne in upon him that he had been guilty of a sin of omission. An awkward silence followed, at least so it appeared to Mr. Harper, but it was very tactfully terminated by Miss Bonser, who suddenly asked Miss Dobbs about Harold.

Harold, it seemed, was very keen on Miss Dobbs; in fact, he was her best boy. He was an architect who lived at Wimbledon, but had just taken rooms in town. He was a Cambridge man, had a commission in the Territorials, and was a regular sport. However, this seemed to convey so little to Mr. Harper that the conversation soon appeared to languish in regard to Harold.

After this, the young man sat very anxiously in the cane chair, wanting sorely to get out of it, yet with not enough knowledge of society to be able to do so. "The Adventures of Dick Smith" were calling him loudly, yet he had too little courage and too much politeness to venture upon the headlong flight which above all things he now desired. Presently, however, his air of mute misery appealed to his hostess, who suddenly said with great good nature. "Now, don’t you be staying, Harry, a moment longer than you think you ought. I know you want to get back to your writing." And Miss Dobbs rose and shook hands with him gravely. Miss Bonser then sat up in her wicker chair and offered her hand at a very fashionable angle, but said good-by with real friendliness, and then Mr. Harper made a very awkward exit without either self-possession or dignity.

"Chase me," said Miss Bonser, as soon as the smiling Miss Dobbs had returned from letting the young man out of the front door.

"Priceless, isn’t he?" Miss Dobbs flung herself with a suppressed giggle into a wicker chair.

"Well, well," reflected Miss Bonser. "One of these days he may be useful to bring you in out of the rain."

"If he begins to make good," said Miss Dobbs sagely. "You never know your luck."

"Cruelty to children, isn’t it?"

Miss Dobbs smiled thoughtfully. "Don’t you think his eyes are rather nice?" she said.

"He’s got a lot in his face," said Miss Bonser. "That’s a face that’s seen things. And I’m not so sure, dear, that he is such a juggins as we fancy."

"We’ll hope not at any rate," said Miss Dobbs coolly.

"Still, I like a man with a punch in him myself."

"Perhaps I’ll be able to improve him a bit. He hardly knows he’s born at present."

"That’s true, dear," said Miss Bonser, with a rather indiscreet gurgle.

"It’s nothing to laugh at, Zoe." To the surprise of her friend, Miss Dobbs seemed a little hurt.

"Well, well." Miss Bonser flung away the end of her cigarette.

XI

"The Adventures of Dick Smith" continued to make progress. Still, it was uphill work. But Henry Harper had a tenacity truly remarkable--"the angelic patience of genius," in the phrase of Balzac. Not that it ever occurred to the Sailor himself that he was a genius, or for that matter to Mr. Rudge, who did not believe in genius; yet, a little ironically, Miss Dobbs informed her friend Miss Bonser more than once that she would not be surprised if he turned out a bit of one.

Mr. Harper’s first visit to King John’s Mansions was not his last. Miss Dobbs saw to that. He was so odd that she was tempted to ask herself whether this particular game was worth the candle; also her friends were continually asking each other a similar question on her behalf. Nevertheless, "Harry" unconsciously formed quite a habit of going to tea round the corner in the Avenue on Sunday afternoons.

He was chaffed rather unmercifully at times by several of the ladies he found there, in particular by a certain Miss Gertie Press, by nature so witty and sarcastic that the young man was genuinely afraid of her. Still, it was a very valuable experience to have the entree to this dashing circle, and often when he did not wish to go he forced himself to do so by sheer power of will, he had such a strong, ever-growing desire to improve himself and to increase his knowledge of the world.

Miss Gertie Press was a knut. It was about the time that portent was coming into vogue. She was one of the rather primitive kind to be found in the second row of the Frivolity chorus of which she was an ornament. She was extremely good-natured, as all these ladies seemed to be, at least in Mr. Harper’s presence; but could he have heard their comments when he had returned to his "masterpiece," about which they were always chaffing him, he might have held other views. "Greased Lightning" was Miss Press’s name for him, he was so extraordinarily quick in the uptake! "He’s got the brains of my boot," said she. "Your money is on the wrong horse, Cora."

These ladies were really sorry for poor Cora. She must be potty to trouble herself with a thing like that. But the time came when Cora’s friends began to think differently.

At the end of April, after nearly eight months' hard toil, in the course of which the "Adventures" had been cut down one half, and the half that remained had been remodeled and rewritten, and then written all over again, the Sailor packed up the manuscript, without any particular emotion except a vague one of simple despair, and sent it to the editor of Brown’s Magazine, from whom he had not heard a word since September 5.

Mr. Rudge, after reading the revised version in a very conscientious manner, thought the grammar decidedly weak, and felt the thing must always suffer from being a work of the imagination. In his eyes nothing could soften that cardinal defect; but he was a liberal-minded man, and if Brown’s Magazine was really interested in that sort of thing—​well, it was no business of his to decry it. There was no accounting for taste after all, and Brown’s was certainly the best magazine of its kind in existence.

A week passed, and then one evening the replica of a certain envelope which would ever remain upon the tablets of his memory was dropped through the slit in the shop door. It was addressed to "Henry Harper, Esquire," and ran as follows:

DEAR MR. HARPER,

Come and see me as soon as you can and let us have another little talk about "The adventures of Dick Smith."

Very sincerely yours, EDWARD AMBROSE.

Henry Harper did not understand the significance of those few and simple words. Mr. Rudge had a fair juster appreciation of the three barely legible lines signed "Edward Ambrose." But the next morning, after further ministrations of his master’s clothes brush, the young man went courageously forth to 12B, Pall Mall.

The bemedaled commissionaire and the bald-headed gentleman had no terrors for him now. Had he not walked and talked with Zeus himself? These Olympian sconce bearers could not eat him, and there is always comfort in that reflection for an imaginative mind. Even a ten minutes' wait in the room below did not matter.

Mr. Ambrose greeted him with a grip of the hand which seemed to utter a volume.

"It’s a very fine thing," said the editor, without a word of preface, as if there could be only one thought for either just then. "At least that’s my opinion." He laughed a little at his own vehemence. "Some people will not agree with me. They’ll say it’s too crude, they’ll say the colors are laid on too thick. But that to me is its wonderful merit; it convinces in spite of itself, which is almost the surest test of genius, although that’s a big word. But you’ve a great faculty. I’m so glad you’ve been able to make such a fine thing." His eyes shone; the charming voice vibrated with simple enthusiasm. "How one envies a man who can make a thing like that!"

"You needn’t, sir," said the Sailor, hardly knowing that he had spoken.

Edward Ambrose fell to earth like an exploded firework. In spite of an eagerness of temperament which amused his friends, he was not a vaporer. He, too, had been in deep places, although the strange kingdoms he had seen were not exactly those of this young man, this curious, awkward, silent, unforgettable figure.

"No, I expect not," said Mr. Ambrose in a changed tone, after a short pause. And then he added abruptly, "Now, suppose we sit down and talk business."

They sat down, but the Sailor had no better idea of talking business than the table in front of him.

"I want very much to run it as a serial in the magazine," said the editor.

"I’ll be very proud, sir."

"Well, now, what do you think we ought to pay for it? Just for the serial rights, you know. Of course I ought to explain that you are a new and untried author, and so on. But to my mind that’s cheating. Either a thing is or it isn’t. I dare say I’m wrong …​ in a world in which nothing is certain …​ however …​ what do you think we ought to pay for the serial rights?

"I’ll leave it to you, sir."

"Well, the magazine can afford to pay three hundred pounds. And we will talk about the book rights later."

Such a sum was beyond the Sailor’s wildest dreams. Truth to tell he had dreamed very little upon that aspect of the matter. He knew the value of money, therefore it had never occurred to him that it would be within the power of a pen and a bottle of ink to bring it to him in such fabulous quantities. He seemed just now to be living in a dream.

"Three hundred pounds, then," said Mr. Ambrose. "And I wish the magazine could have paid more without injustice to itself. But its audience is small, though select—​as we hope—​at any rate."

The Sailor’s manner showed very clearly that no apology was called for. Such a sum was princely. Gratitude was the emotion uppermost, and he did his best to express it in his queer, disjointed way.

"I’ll always remember your kindness, sir," he said huskily. "I’d never have been able to make anything of it at all if it hadn’t been for you."

"Oh, yes, you would. Not so soon, perhaps, but it’s all there. Anyhow, I’m very glad if I’ve been a bit of use at the first fence."

The cordial directness of Edward Ambrose made a strong appeal to the Sailor. He had knocked about the world enough to begin to know something of men. And of one thing he was already convinced. The editor was of the true Klondyke breed. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said. And when this fortunate interview was at an end and the young man returned to the Charing Cross Road, it was not so much the fabulous sum which had come to him that made him happy, as the sure knowledge that he had found a friend. He had found a friend of the kind for which his soul had long craved.

XII

"Now that Greased Lightning is beginning to make good," said Miss Gertie Press, "I suppose you’ll marry him, my Cora?"

"Shouldn’t wonder. Have a banana."

This was persiflage on the part of Miss Dobbs. She meant have a cigarette.

Miss Press lit the cheap but scented Egyptian that was offered her, and lay back in the wicker chair with an air of languor which somehow did not match up with the gaminlike acuteness of her comically ill-natured countenance.

"That’s where long views come in," philosophized Miss Press. "Wish I could take 'em. But I can’t. I haven’t the nous. We all thought you was potty to take up with him. But you won’t half give us the bird now he looks like turning out a good investment."

Miss Dobbs smiled at the frankness of her friend. Miss Press was noted throughout the length and the breadth of the Avenue for her habit of thinking aloud.

Miss Zoe Bonser, who was eating a tea cake, also smiled. It was Sunday afternoon, and these three ladies were awaiting the arrival of Mr. Henry Harper in a rather speculative frame of mind. The previous Sunday Mr. Harper had not appeared.

It was no longer possible to laugh at the mere name of Greased Lightning and to pull Cora’s leg and chaff her unmercifully. It seemed that Miss Bonser, having mentioned casually to Mr. Albert Hobson that she had a friend who had a friend who knew a young fellow whose first serial was just beginning in Brown’s, the admired Albert had inquired immediately:

"What’s the name of your young fellow?"

"He’s not my young fellow," said Zoe the cautious. "But his name’s—​Lord, I’ve forgotten it!" This was untrue. "But we all think he’s potty."

"His name is not Henry Harper, by any chance?"

Miss Bonser nodded discreetly. She was a little surprised at the set of the wind.

"But, of course, he’s barmy."

"Whatever he is, he’s no slouch," said the judicial Mr. Hobson. He himself was no slouch either, in spite of the company which in hours of ease he affected. "He’ll go far. He’s another Stevenson and with luck one of these days he might be something bigger."

"Don’t care if he’s a John Roberts or a Dawson," said Zoe; "he’s not fit to be out without his nurse." If the latter part of Mr. Hobson’s statement had meant little to that astute mind, the first part meant a good deal.

Miss Bonser bore the news to King John’s Mansions on the following Sunday afternoon. It made quite a sensation. Bert Hobson was the nearest thing to "the goods" which had yet impinged on that refined circle. He was something more than the average harmless fool about town; in the opinion of Miss Dobbs and Miss Press, he knew his way about; and if Albert had really said that Harry was the coming man, he could not have such a great distance to travel.

"I hope he is not going to give us a miss in baulk now he’s got there. That’ll be swank if he does, won’t it, Bonser?" Miss Press winked at Miss Bonser in a serio-comic manner.

"It will, Press," said that lady.

"He’ll come. You’ll see," said Miss Dobbs, with reasoned optimism. "He’s here now."

In fact, at that moment a mild assault was being delivered by the decrepit knocker on a faintly responsive front door.

"What was the check that Brown’s gave him?" Miss Press asked Miss Bonser, as Miss Dobbs went forth to receive her guest.

"Three hundred—​so she says."

"Do you believe it?"

"Why not?"

"But he’s barmy."

"All these writing men are."

"Except Bert."

"Oh, he’s barmy in a way, else he wouldn’t have taken up with me."

"Yes, that’s true, dear. But did he say that about It?"

"Ye-es."

"Well, it’s time she had a bit of luck …​ if she’s really going to have it. She wants it badly."

"Yes, by God."

At this moment Mr. Henry Harper came into the room. He entered very nervously with his usual blush of embarrassment. The truth was, although he had yet to realize it clearly, the undercurrent of sarcasm, never absent from this refined atmosphere, always hurt him. Mr. Henry Harper was a very sensitive plant, and these fashionable and witty ladies did not appear to know that.

"He’s a swanker," was the greeting of Miss Press, as she offered her hand and then withdrew it playfully before Mr. Harper could take it. "And I never shake hands with a swanker, do I, Bonser?"

"But he’s so clever," said Miss Bonser, politely offering hers. "He’s Bert Hobson at his best."

Mr. Harper was so overcome by this reception that he had the misfortune to knock over the teapot, which had been placed on a small and ill-balanced Japanese table.

"Damn you!" The voice of the hostess came upon the culprit like the stroke of a whip. For a moment Miss Dobbs was off her guard. She was furious at the ruin of her carpet and her hospitality, although the latter was really the more important as the carpet was ruined already. "However, it doesn’t matter." She hastened to cover the "Damn you" with a heroic smile. "Take a pew, Harry, and make yourself comfy. I can easily get some more; it’s the slavey’s Sunday out." The hostess, teapot in hand, withdrew from the room with a winning air of reconstituted amenity.

"If you had been a little gentleman," said Miss Press, as the hostess left the room, "you would have shot out of your chair, opened the door for her, carried the teapot to the kitchen, and held the caddy while she put in more tea. And then you’d have fiddled about with the kettle while she held the teapot, and poured boiling water over her hand. After that you’d have gone down on your knees, and then you’d have kissed it better. At least, that’s how you’d have behaved if you had been a mother’s boy in the Guards. Wouldn’t he, Bonser?"

"Shut up, Press," said Miss Bonser. "It’s a shame to rag as you do."

"But he’s a swanker," said Miss Press. "And I don’t like swankers."

Mr. Harper was in a state of extreme misery and feeling very pink about the ears, when the smiling Miss Dobbs reappeared with a fresh pot of tea. The way in which she contrived to efface the tragic incident was admirable. She poured out gracefully a cup of tea for Mr. Harper, a terribly weak cup of tea it was, and pressed half a buttered scone upon him and smiled at him all the time, perhaps a little anxiously, with her wonderful teeth. But in spite of these winning attentions, it was not certain that the young man was going to enjoy himself. That honest and forthright "Damn you" had brought with it somehow the taste of Auntie’s whip, and he could feel it still. Then, too, these clever and witty ladies had a way of making him feel ridiculous. Also, they spoke a language he didn’t understand. Moreover, he knew that Miss Press meant it when she said he wasn’t a gentleman. To tell the truth, that was a fact of which he was growing daily more conscious, and the jesting remark of Miss Press hurt almost as much as the "Damn you."

"If I was clever, and had a three-hundred-pound serial running in Brown’s Magazine," said Miss Press, "I’d be so set up with myself that I wouldn’t give a word to a dog when I came out to a bun-worry. Would you, Bonser?"

"Shut up, Press," said the benign Miss Bonser. "Little girls should be seen but not heard—​at least, that’s what my dear old governess taught me in the long ago."

"Yes, I knew you was brought up a clergyman’s daughter," said Miss Press, returning stoutly to the charge. "And so was Pressy and so was Dobby, and so was all of us."

"Play cricket, Pressy," said the hostess, rather plaintively.

For all that he knew, Mr. Harper might have been listening to a dead language. This may have relieved his mind a little. All the same, it made it very difficult to take a hand in the conversation, which these ladies clearly felt to be the duty of a gentleman, whether he was in the Guards or not.

Suddenly Miss Press caused a portion of Mr. Harper’s buttered scone "to go the wrong way" by placing one of his hands in that of his hostess, who had taken a seat rather near him.

"Allow me," said Miss Press, rising gallantly from her chair, and dealing Mr. Harper a succession of hearty buffets in the middle of the back. "You really are the limit, Enery. You might never have been in love before."

"Chuck it, Pressy," said Miss Dobbs. "Let my Harry alone. My Harry’s very clever, and his Cora’s very proud of him. Aren’t I, Harry?" Miss Dobbs flashed upon the unhappy young man a glance of very high candle power. She also sighed seraphically.

When Mr. Harper had swallowed his tea, of which one cup sufficed, and after abandoning any further attempt to deal with his buttered scone, the hostess gathered the tea things with the aid of her friends. She then took them to the back premises, declining further help. In spite of the protests of her guests, Miss Dobbs insisted on this self-denying course. She left Mr. Henry Harper in their care, and hoped they would do their best to amuse him during her absence.

XIII

"Harry," said Miss Press, with a dramatic change of tone as soon as the hostess had retired with the tea things, "Zoe and I have to talk to you very serious. Haven’t we, Zoe?"

Miss Bonser nodded impressively.

"You are not playing fair with Cora, Harry."

During the slight pause which followed this statement, a look of fawnlike bewilderment flitted across the eyes of the Sailor.

"You are breaking her heart," said Miss Press, with tragic simplicity.

"Yes, dear," came the thrilling whisper of Miss Bonser.

"That’s true."

"We are telling you this, Harry," said Miss Press, "because we think it is something you ought to know. You think so, don’t you, dear?"

"I do, dear," said Miss Bonser.

"Cora is one of the best that ever stepped," said Miss Press. "She has a heart of gold, she is a girl in a thousand. It would be a black shame to spoil her life. You think that, don’t you, dear?"

"Yes, dear," said Miss Bonser emotionally.

Mr. Harper was completely out of his depth. He didn’t know in the least what they were talking about.

"Forgive us, Harry, for taking it upon ourselves in this way," said Miss Bonser, in a kind, quiet voice. "We are all for a bit of fun, but we can’t stand by and see a good girl suffering in silence, can we, Gertie?"

"No, dear," said Gertie, with pathos.

Both ladies eyed him cautiously. He was so innocent, he was such a simple child that they could almost have found it in their hearts to pity him.

"We feel bound to mention it, Harry," said Miss Press. "Poor Cora can’t take her oats or anything. She has to have a sleeping draught now."

"And she’s getting that thin, poor thing," chimed the plaintive Miss Bonser.

The Sailor’s perplexity grew.

"If you ask me," said Miss Press, suddenly taking a higher note, "it’s up to you, Harry, to play the gentleman." Watching the color change in his face, she knew she was on the target now. "A gentleman don’t play fast and loose, if you ask me."

"At least, not the sort we are used to," whispered Miss Bonser, in a superb pianissimo.

"It’s Lord Caradoc and Pussy Pearson over again," said Miss Press. "But Caradoc being the goods married Pussy without making any bones about it. Harry, it’s up to you to follow the example of a real gentleman. Forgive us for speaking plain."

Henry Harper glanced nervously from one lady to the other. A light was just beginning to dawn upon him.

"Cora’s a straight girl," said Miss Bonser, taking up the parable. "She’s one of the plucky ones, is Cora. It’s a hard world for lonely girls like her, isn’t it, Gert?"

"It is, dear," said Gert. "And one like Cora, whose position, as you might say, is uncertain, can’t be too careful. You see, Harry, you have been coming to her flat for the best part of a year. You’ve been with her to the theater and the Coliseum; two Sundays ago she was seen with you on the river, and—​well, she’s been getting herself talked about, and that’s all there is to it."

"Cora’s a girl in a thousand," chimed Zoe the tactful. "She worships the ground you walk on, Harry."

A painfully startled look came suddenly into the eyes of the young man. Both ladies felt the look rather than saw it, and gave another sharp turn to the screw.

"Of course, you haven’t known it, Harry," said Miss Press. "She wouldn’t let you know it. But that’s Cora."

"She would rather have died," said Zoe. "You will not breathe a word, of course, Harry. She would never forgive us if she knew we had let on."

"That’s her pride," said Miss Press.

"And the way that poor thing cried her eyes out when you didn’t turn up at tea time last Sunday as usual, the first time for nearly a year, well----" Language suddenly failed Miss Bonser. "A pretty job we had with her, hadn’t we, Gert?"

So cunningly had the screw been applied, that Mr. Harper felt dazed. Suddenly Miss Bonser raised a finger of warning.

"Shush!" It was half a whisper, half a hiss. "Not a word. Here’s Cora."

Miss Dobbs came in so abruptly that she nearly caught the injunction. And hardly had she entered, when Miss Press and Miss Bonser rose together and declared that they must really be going.

The hostess made a polite and conventional objection, but both ladies kissed her effusively and hustled her out into the passage.

"Dobby," Miss Press whispered excitedly, as soon as they had reached that dark and smelly draught distributor, "we’ve fairly put the half Nelson on him. Now go in and fix him up."

Miss Bonser and Miss Press tripped down the many unswept stone stairs of King John’s Mansions, and Miss Dobbs closed the front door of No. 106. She then returned to Mr. Harper in the "boo-door."

"Well, Harry," she said, "why didn’t you come last Sunday?"

Had the Sailor been true to his strongest instinct he would have fled. But he stayed where he was for several reasons, and of these the most cogent was quite a simple one. There was a will stronger than his own in the room just then.

Miss Bonser and Miss Press, as became a long experience of the chase, had done their work with efficiency. The Sailor had not guessed that this friendly and amusing and very agreeable lady—​in spite of the "Damn you"--was so very much in love with him. It was a wholly unexpected issue, for which the young man was inclined to blame himself bitterly.

"Well, Harry," said Miss Dobbs, breaking suddenly upon a whirl of rather terrifying thoughts, "why didn’t you come last Sunday?"

He was in a state of mental chaos, therefore to attempt to answer the question was useless.

"Why didn’t oo, Harry?" Miss Dobbs suddenly felt that it was a case for force majeure. Very unexpectedly she flung her arms round his neck. Risking the rickety cane chair she sat heavily upon his knee, yet not so heavily as she might have done, and with a she-leopard’s tenderness drew his head to her ample bosom.

A thrill of repugnance passed through Henry Harper, yet he was so fully engaged with a very pressing problem as hardly to know that it had.

"Kiss your Cora, Harry."

But his Cora kissed Harry instead. And as she did so, the unfailing instinct given to woman told her that that kiss was a mistake.

In the next instant, the fat arms had disengaged themselves from the young man’s neck, and Miss Dobbs had slipped from his knee and was standing looking at him.

Her gesture was striking and picturesque; also she had the air of a tragedy queen.

"Harry," she said, with a catch in her voice, "you are breaking my heart."

The Sailor had already been informed of that. He had tried not to believe it, but facts were growing too strong for him. A superb tear was in the eyes of Miss Dobbs. The sight of it thrilled and startled him.

Twice before in his life had he seen tears in the eyes of a woman, and with his abnormal power of memory he vividly recalled each occasion now. The first time was in the eyes of Mother, the true woman he would always reverence, when she took off his clothes after his first flight from Blackhampton, and put him into a bath; the second time was in the eyes of Miss Foldal, and she also was a true woman whose memory he would always honor, when she said good-bye on the night of the second departure from the city of his birth. But the tears in the eyes of Mother and Miss Foldal were not as the superb and terrible tear in the eye of Miss Cora Dobbs.

"Don’t think I blame you, Harry," said that lady with a Jocasta-like note, trying to keep the bitterness out of her tone. "I’m only a lonely and unprotected girl who will soon be on the shelf, but that’s no fault of yours. Yet, somehow, I thought you were different. Somehow, I thought you was a gentleman."

Miss Dobbs had no illusions on that point, but she well knew where the shoe was going to pinch.

"I’ll be a mark and a laughing stock," said the tragic Cora, "as poor Pussy was before Caradoc made up his mind to marry her. While he was plain Bill Jackson nothing was good enough for Pussy. Used to take her to the Coliseum and on the river in the summer, and used to come to her flat a bit lower down the Avenue to take tea with her and her friends every Sunday of his life. And then suddenly Bill came into the title, and poor Pussy got a miss from my lord. We all thought at first she would go out of her mind. She worshiped the ground that Bill walked upon. Besides, she couldn’t bear to be made a mark of by her friends; and being nothing but a straight girl there was always her reputation to consider. Poor Pussy had to take a sleeping draught every night for months. But Caradoc played cricket in the end as he was bound to do, being a gentleman by birth, and Pussy is now a countess with two children, a boy and a girl, and only last summer she invited me to go and spend a fortnight with her at her place in Ireland, but, of course, I couldn’t, because I hadn’t the clothes. Still, I’m glad for Pussy’s sake. She was always one of the best, was Pussy. All’s well that ends well, isn’t it?" And Miss Jocasta Dobbs very abruptly broke down.

It was a breakdown of the most nerve-shattering kind. The tears streamed down her face. She struggled almost hysterically not to give way, yet the more she struggled, the more she did give way.

"Miss Dobbs," he gasped, huskily—​he had known her a long and crowded year, but he had never ventured on Cora--"Miss Cora"--he had done it now! "I didn’t mean nothing."

Better had he held his peace.

"You didn’t mean anything!" There was a change in the voice of Jocasta. "You didn’t mean anything, Mr. Harper? No, I suppose not."

The young man drew in his breath sharply. The tone of Miss Dobbs was edged like a knife.

"It was only a poor and unprotected girl with whom you might play the fool until you had made good. It was only a girl who valued her fair name, a girl who would have died rather than be made a mark of by her friends. I suppose now you are a big man and earning big money, you will take up with somebody else. Well, I’m not the one to grudge any girl her luck."

The sudden fall in the voice of Miss Dobbs and the half veiled look in her eyes somehow took Henry Harper back to the Auntie of his childhood. And it almost seemed that she also had in her hand a weapon which she knew well how to use.

"I thought I had a gentleman to deal with," said Miss Dobbs, brushing aside a tear, "but it was my mistake. However, it’s never too late to learn." Her laugh seemed to strike him.

"I didn’t mean to mislead you," mumbled the young man, who felt like a trapped and desperate animal. Yet when all was said, the emotion uppermost was not for himself. This woman was hurting him horribly, but it was the fact, as he thought, that he was hurting her still more without any intention of evil towards her, which now took possession of his mind. He would do anything to soften the pain he was unwittingly causing. It was not in his nature to hurt a living thing.

"I beg pardon, Miss Cora," he said, faintly, "I didn’t mean nothing like that."

She turned upon him, a tigress, and rent him. Nor did he shrink from the wounds she dealt. It was no more than he deserved. He should have learned a little more about ladies and their fine feelings and their social outlook, before daring to go to tea at their private flats and to meet their friends; before daring to be seen with them at a public place like the Coliseum or in a boat on the river. He was receiving a much needed lesson. It was one he would never forget.

XIV

Henry Harper did not go to tea at King John’s Mansions on the next Sunday afternoon. And on the following Sunday he stayed away too. Moreover, during the whole of that fortnight Miss Cora Dobbs did not call once at No. 249, Charing Cross Road.

This was a relief to the young man. He would not have known how to meet her had she come to the shop as usual. He was so shattered by the bolt from the blue that he didn’t know in the least what to do.

Happily there was his work to distract him. Mr. Ambrose had suggested that he should write another tale for Brown’s Magazine. He was to take his own time over the new story, bearing ever in mind the advice given him formerly, which he had turned to very good account; and in the meantime, his fancy could expand in the happy knowledge that the "Adventures of Dick Smith" were attracting attention in the magazine. Mr. Ambrose had already arranged for the story to appear as a book when its course had run in Brown’s, and he was convinced—​if prophecy was ever safe in literary matters—​that real success awaited it.

Could Henry Harper have put Miss Cora Dobbs out of his thoughts, he might have been almost completely happy in planning and writing the "Further Adventures of Dick Smith." Aladdin’s wonderful lamp was making his life a fairy tale. An incredible vista of fame and fortune was spreading before his eyes. Even Mr. Rudge had been stricken with awe by the check for three hundred pounds.

Yet, at the back of everything just now was a terrible feeling of indecision. There could be no doubt that the great world of which he knew so little, clearly looked to him "to act the gentleman." The phrase was that of the elegant and refined Miss Bonser and the dashing Miss Press, who mixed habitually with gentlemen, and therefore were in a position to speak with authority on such a delicate matter. And so plain was his duty that it had even percolated to Mrs. Greaves, who, in ways subtle and mysterious, seemed to be continually unbosoming herself to a similar tenor.

In the course of the third week of crisis, Mr. Harper’s perplexities were greatly increased by a brief but emotional note, written on elegantly art-shaded notepaper, which had the name "Cora" with a ring round it engraved in the left-hand corner. It said:

DEAR HARRY,

Why haven’t you been or written? I am feeling so low and miserable that unless you come to see me Sunday, the doctor says I shall have a bad breakdown.

Yours, CORA.

Somehow, this letter, couched in such grimly pathetic terms, seemed to leave the young man with no alternative. Therefore, on the following Sunday afternoon, at the usual hour, he was just able to screw up courage to knock at the door of No. 106, King John’s Mansions.

He was rather surprised to find Cora in good health; certainly the tone of her letter had implied that such was not the case. She had no appearance of suffering. In tone and manner she was a little chastened, but that was all.

Miss Bonser and Miss Press were also there when Mr. Harper arrived. But their reception of him was so much more formal than was usual that a feeling of tension was at once created. It was as if these experienced ladies understood that some high issue was pending.

Each of them treated him in quite a different way from that which she had used before. In her own style, each was lofty and grande dame. It was no longer Harry, but Mr. Harper; and they shook hands with him without cordiality, but with quiet dignity, and said, "How do you do?"

Strange to say, Mr. Harper found this reception more to his liking than the less studied manner in which he was received as a rule. Now that he had not to meet persiflage and chaff, he was fairly cool and collected. The stately bow of Miss Press and the archly fashionable handshake of Miss Bonser were much less embarrassing than their habitual mode of attack.

This afternoon, Mr. Harper was treated as a chance acquaintance might have been by three fashionable ladies who knew the world better than they knew him. There was a subtle note of distance. This afternoon, Miss Press talked books and theaters, and talked them very well, although, to be sure, rather better about the latter than the former. Yet in Mr. Harper’s judgment, her conversation was more improving than her usual mode of discourse. Had he not been in such a state of turmoil it would have been quite a pleasure to sit and listen, she talked so well about the things that were beginning to interest him intensely; also her manner of speaking was extremely refined.

Miss Bonser talked mainly about the Royal Academy of Arts. She knew a good deal about art, having studied it, although in what capacity she didn’t state, before she went to the Maison Perry. Nevertheless, she had both fluency and point; she didn’t like Leader so much as she liked Sargent; she spoke of values, composition, brushwork, draughtmanship, and it was really a pity that Mr. Harper was not easier in his mind, otherwise he could not have failed to be edified. As it was, Miss Press and Miss Bonser rose considerably in his estimation. He could have wished that they always hoisted themselves on these high subjects.

Both ladies, wearing white gloves and looking very comme il faut, went soon after five, as they had promised to go on to Lady Caradoc’s. Mr. Harper felt quite sorry. They had talked so well about the things that interested him that somehow their distinguished departure left a void. As they got up to go, Mr. Harper, remembering a hint he had received from Miss Press, touching the behavior of a gentleman in such circumstances, sprang to the door, and with less awkwardness than usual, contrived to open it for them to pass out.

The ordeal he dreaded was now upon him. He was with Cora alone. However, much to his relief, there was no sign at present of "a bad breakdown."

For three weeks he had been living in a little private hell of indecision. But now there was a chance of winning through. His duty was not yet absolutely clear, but he was not without hope that it would become so. In that time he had been thinking very hard and very deep. And by some means, he had added a cubit to his stature since he stood last on that tea-stained hearthrug in the quasi-comfort of that overfurnished "boo-door." It was a new and enlarged Mr. Harper who now confronted a more composed and dignified Miss Dobbs.

"Well, Harry," said Miss Dobbs, "it is nice to see you here again."

He was touched by such a tone of magnanimity. Somehow, he felt that it was more than he deserved.

"How’s the new story getting on?" There was not a sign of the breakdown at present. "Will it be as good as the old one?" This was a welcome return to her first phase of generous interest; to the Miss Dobbs of whom he had memories not wholly unpleasant.

"I think it is going to be better," he said gravely. "Much better. Anyway, I intend it to be."

"That’s right. I like to hear that. Nothing like ambition. I suppose you’ll get another three hundred for this one?"

"Five," said the young man. "That’s if the editor likes it."

"My!" said Miss Dobbs, with an involuntary flash of the wary eyes. "And that’s only for the serial."

"Yes."

"And, of course, you’ll be able to bring it out as a book as well?"

"The editor has arranged for that already. For the present one, I mean."

"But you’ll get paid for it extra, of course!"

"Oh yes."

"How much?" Miss Dobbs spoke carelessly, but her eyes were by no means careless.

"I’ll get a shilling for every copy that’s sold."

"And how many will they sell?"

"Nobody knows that," he said, and from his tone it seemed that aspect of the matter was unimportant.

"No, I expect not." Her tone coincided readily with his. "But I suppose a man like Stevenson or Bert Hobson would sell by the hundred thousand?"

"No idea," said the young man.

"But you ought to have an idea, Harry. It’s very important. What you want is somebody with a head for business to look after your affairs."

He was inclined to accept this view of the matter, but there would be time to think of that when he really was selling in thousands, which, of course, could not be until the book was published.

"When will it be published?"

"Next week."

"Next week! And you are going to get a sure five hundred, apart from the book, for the story you are writing now?"

"If Mr. Ambrose likes it."

"Of course he’ll like it. You must make it so good that he can’t help liking it."

"I’ll try, anyway."

Miss Dobbs grew thoughtful. She was inclined to believe, having regard to all the circumstances, that she had a difficult hand to play. Therefore, she began to arrange two or three of the leading cards in her mind. To be perfectly candid with herself, she could not help thinking, and her two friends had confirmed her in that view, that she had shown lack of judgment in the cards she had played already. For one thing, it was agreed that they might have a little underrated the size and the weight of the fish that had to be landed.

Miss Dobbs was a trifle uncertain as to what her next move should be. There was much at stake, and one blunder in tactics might be fatal. However, she was about to receive assistance of a kind she had felt it would no longer be wise to expect.

"Miss Dobbs …​ Cora," said the young man, with an abruptness that startled her. "There’s something …​ something particular I want to say to you."

Cora was on guard at once. But she was able to make clear that whatever he might have to say to her, she was prepared to listen.

"I’ve been thinking a goodish bit," said Henry Harper, with a quaint stiffening of manner as the gruff words found a way out of him, "about that talk we had the last time I come here."

Miss Dobbs listened with eyes half shut. Her face was a mask.

"I don’t pretend to know much about what’s due to ladies," he said, after a pause so long and so trying that it seemed to hypnotize him. "I’ve not mixed much in Society"--W. M. Thackeray, in whose works he was now taking so much interest, had a great belief in Society--"but I should like to do what’s straight."

Silence still seemed the part of wisdom for Miss Dobbs.

"If I’ve done wrong, I’m sorry." There was another very awkward pause to navigate. "But I didn’t see no harm in what I’ve done, and that’s the truth."

A very slight sniff from Miss Dobbs …​ a very slight sniff and nothing more.

"If I never speak again, Miss Cora, it’s a solemn fact."

The sniff grew slightly more pronounced.

"If I had known a bit more about Society, I might not have come here quite so often."

"What’s Society got to do with it, anyway?" suddenly asked Miss Dobbs, who was getting a trifle bored by the word.

"I don’t know," said the young man, "but I thought it had."

"Why should you think so?"

"Hasn’t it, Miss Cora?"

At this point, it seemed necessary for Miss Dobbs to regard the situation as a whole. A wrong move here might be fatal.

"Yes, I suppose it has," said she, trying very hard to keep from laughing in his face. "If you put it that way."

Again there was a pause. Henry Harper seemed to be overawed by this admission on the part of a lady of great experience.

"I make no claim"--Miss Dobbs felt that a little well-timed assistance was called for--"if that’s what you mean. My reputation’s gone, but as I am only a girl, without a shilling, who has to fight her own battle, of course it’s not of the slightest consequence."

"That’s just what I want to talk to you about," he said, with a simplicity that made her lip curl in spite of the strong will which ruled it. Zoe was right, it was cruelty to children.

"Talk away, then," said Miss Dobbs, with dreary and tragic coldness.

"I just want to do right. I admit I’ve done wrong. But what I’ve done, I’ve done in ignorance. I didn’t know it would be against your reputation for me to come here constant, and to take you on the river, and go with you to the theater and the Coliseum."

"No, I don’t suppose you did," said Cora, holding her hand very carefully now that he had been such a fool as to put a weapon in it. "No, I suppose not, Mr. Harper."

The "Mr." was stressed very slightly, but she felt him flinch a little.

"Well, Miss Cora," he said huskily, "it’s like this. I just want to do right by you as any other gentleman would."

"Oh, do you, Mr. Harper." She fixed him with the eye of a basilisk.

"Yes," he said, and the sweat broke out on his forehead. "Whatever it’s got to be."

She sensed the forehead rather than saw it. Every nerve in her was now alert. Yet the desire uppermost was to spit in his face, or to dash her fist in it with all the strength she had, but at such a moment she could not afford to give rein to the woman within. She must bide her time. The fish was hooked, but it still remained to land it.

"Well, Mr. Harper, I am sure you are most kind. But you know better than I can tell you that there is only one thing you can do under the circumstances." And Miss Dobbs suddenly laughed in Mr. Harper’s face, in order to show that she was not such a fool as to treat his heroics seriously.

"What’s that, Miss Cora?" he asked, huskily.

"What’s that, Mr. Harper? What innocence! I wonder where you was brought up?"

"Don’t ask that, Miss Cora." He could have bitten out his tongue almost before the words had slipped from it.

But Miss Cora was not going to be sidetracked at this critical moment by a matter so trivial as Mr. Harper’s upbringing.

"You take away a straight girl’s reputation, you as good as ruin her, and then you come and ask her what you should do about it. What ho, she bumps!" And Miss Dobbs, with an irrelevance fully equal to her final remark, suddenly flung herself down to the further detriment of the broken-springed sofa.

Mr. Harper, however, was able to recognize this as a cry of the soul of a lady in agony.

"If you think I ought to marry you," he said, with dry lips, "I’ll do it."

Miss Dobbs, flopping on the sofa, sat up suddenly with a complete change of manner.

"It’s not what I think, Mr. Harper," she said. "That don’t matter. It’s what you think that matters. If a man is a gentleman, he don’t ask those sort of things."

"No, I suppose he doesn’t," said Mr. Harper, who suddenly felt and saw the great force of this. "Miss Dobbs …​ Cora…​. I …​ I …​ will you marry me, Miss Cora?"

The answer of Miss Cora was to rise from the sofa in the stress of feminine embarrassment. But she did not fall into his arms, as some ladies might have done; she did not even change color. She merely said in an extremely practical voice--

"Harry, you’ve done right, and I’m glad you’ve acted the toff. There was those who said you wouldn’t, but we’ll not mention names. However, all’s well that ends well. And the sooner we get married the better."

He made no reply. But a slow, deadly feeling had begun to creep along his spine.

"Do you mind where we are married, Harry?"

"No," he said, gently, with faraway eyes.

"I’m all for privacy," said Miss Dobbs, in her practical voice. "I hope you are."

"Whatever’s agreeable to you is agreeable to me." He seemed to feel that that was good W. M. Thackeray.

"Very well, then, Harry, tomorrow morning at eleven I’ll call for you, and we’ll toddle round to the Circus and see what the Registrar has to say to us."

"If that’s agreeable to you, it’s agreeable to me," he said, sticking doggedly to his conception of the man of the world and the English gentleman.

"And now, Harry---" But Cora suddenly stopped in the very act of advancing upon him. He had read her purpose, and she had read his eyes; moreover, she had read the look which those eyes had been unable to veil. With the sagacity upon which Miss Cora Dobbs prided herself—​if she happened to be perfectly sober—​she decided to postpone any oscular demonstration of regard for Harry until the next day.

XV

It was not until Tuesday evening that Henry Harper informed the old man who had treated him with such kindness that he had decided to give up his situation. Mr. Rudge was not surprised. Now that the young man’s time had become so valuable his master disinterestedly approved this step, although he would regret the loss of such a trustworthy assistant. Henry Harper then felt called upon to explain that he had married Cora that afternoon, and that he was about to transfer his belongings to No. 106, King John’s Mansions.

"You don’t mean to say you have gone and got married?" said Mr. Rudge.

"Yes, sir. But Cora wanted it to be kept very quiet, else I should have told you before."

"Cora who?" asked his master, pushing up his spectacles on to his forehead.

"Cora Dobbs."

"Do you mean that niece of Mrs. Greaves?"

"Yes, sir."

"Goodness gracious me!" Mr. Rudge was never moved to this objurgation except under duress of very high emotion. "Goodness gracious me …​ why, she’s not respectable!"

"Beg your pardon, sir, but there you are wrong." The young man addressed his master with an independence and a dignity that twenty-four hours ago would not have been possible. "Cora is quite respectable and …​ and Cora’s a lady. If there’s those who think otherwise, it’s my fault for …​ for compromising her." To Mrs. Henry Harper belonged the credit for the word "compromising," although it was worthy of W. M. Thackeray himself.

"Goodness gracious me!" Mr. Rudge mopped his face with a profuse red handkerchief. "Didn’t I most strongly warn you against her when I found her that morning in the shop?"

"You have never once mentioned Cora to me, sir," said Henry Harper respectfully. "And I’m very glad you haven’t, because a great wrong’s been done her."

"Didn’t I tell you she was up to no good, and that you had better be careful?"

"No, sir, you never said a single word to me."

"I certainly meant to do so …​ but that’s my unfortunate memory. I remember I had Charles XII. of Sweden in my head at the time; practically three hundred pages of Volume XXXIII. But it’s no excuse. I’ll never be able to forgive myself for not having warned you. It’s a pity she’s Mrs. Greaves' niece, but I’m as sure as Tilly sacked Magdeburg that that girl Cora is not respectable."

"You are quite mistaken in that, sir," said Henry Harper, with a dignity of an entirely new kind, "because she is now my wife."

"I beg your pardon, Henry." Mr. Rudge had begun to realize that he was letting his tongue run away with him. "I’d forgotten that. I dare say I have been misinformed."

"Yes, sir, I am quite sure of that. You have no idea how careful she is in that way. It is because she is so careful that I’ve married her."

"Goodness gracious me!" said Mr. Rudge.

"She is most particular. And so are all her lady friends. And it’s because I’ve been going to her flat and getting her talked about and going to the Coliseum with her, that I thought I ought to act the gentleman."

"Goodness gracious me! I wouldn’t have had this happen for a thousand pounds."

"I wouldn’t, either, sir," said Henry Harper.

XVI

When, at the instance of the lady who was now his wife, the young man removed his few belongings to No. 106, King John’s Mansions, his first feeling was that he had entered quite a different world. He was very sorry to leave Mr. Rudge, who had been a true friend and to whom he had become deeply attached. Also he was sorry to leave that comfortable sitting-room with all its associations of profitable labor which embodied by far the best hours his life had known. As for the books in the shop, he would miss them dreadfully.

It was a wrench to leave these things. But at the call of duty it had to be. Cora regarded the change as inevitable, and she saw that it was made at once. From the very hour of their marriage, she took absolute charge of him. It was due to her infinitely greater knowledge of life and of the world that one who was so much a child in these matters should defer to her in everything. He was expected to do as he was told, and for the most part he was perfectly willing to fulfil that obligation.

Almost the first question she asked him, as soon as they were man and wife, was what he had done with the check for three hundred pounds? Her highly developed business instinct regarded it as more or less satisfactory, that at the suggestion of Mr. Rudge he had opened an account at a bank. It was a very sensible thing to have done, but it would be even more sensible if the money was paid over to her. She also felt that all sums he earned in the future should be banked in her name. There were many advantages in such a course. In the first place, only one banking account would be necessary, and she always favored simplicity in matters of business. Again, their money would be much safer with her: she understood its value far better than he. Again, it would be wise if she made all financial arrangements; a man who had his head full of writing would naturally not want to be bothered with such tiresome things, and he would have the more time to use his pen.

These arguments were so logical that Harry felt their force. There was no doubt that Cora’s head was much better than his. Besides, as she said, with a penetration which was flattering, he lived in a world of his own, and she was quite sure he ought not to be worried by things of that kind.

Up to a point, this was true. The world Henry Harper lived in at present was largely of his own creation; and he was content that the wife he had married should take these trite burdens from his shoulders. Moreover, at first he did not regret Mr. Rudge and the old privacy as much as he thought he would. Cora was by no means deficient in common sense, and having had what she knew was a great stroke of luck, she determined to show herself worthy of it by doing her best "to settle down."

There was prudence and wisdom in this. Mrs. Henry Harper had been a scholar in a very hard school, and she now hoped to profit by its teaching. Therefore, she tried all she knew to make the young man comfortable, not merely because she liked him as much as it was possible for her to like any man, but also for the more practical reason that he might begin to like her.

At first his work, which meant so much more to him than ever Cora could, suffered far less than he had feared. To be sure, he missed the books terribly. He had not realized the value of those serried rows in the shop until the time had come to do without them. But Mr. Rudge, in saying good-by to him with distress in his honest eyes, had promised that the run of the shelves should always be his.

Now there was no longer the bookshop to look after, he had more time for reading and writing, and for gaining general knowledge. Also Cora had the wisdom to trouble him little. She stayed in bed most of the morning, and as Royal Daylight had strict instructions to walk delicately in going about her household duties, Henry Harper with his habit of rising early was always able to count on a long and uninterrupted morning’s work.

In the afternoon, Cora generally went forth to visit her friends. And as she showed no desire for Harry to accompany her, there were so many more precious hours in which he could do as he liked, in which his fancy could expand. In the evening, however, his trials began. After the first few days of matrimony, Cora developed a passion for restaurants, whither she expected him to accompany her. As a rule they dined at the Roc at the bottom of the Avenue, where there was music and company, and here they sometimes fell in with one or another of Cora’s circle. Then about twice a week they would go on to a theater or a music hall, and have supper at another restaurant. The young man soon grew aware that if Cora’s attention was not fully occupied, she became restless and irritable.

These evenings abroad gave Henry Harper a feeling of profound discomfort. But he did not complain. It would not have been fair to Cora, who, as she proudly said, gave him a free hand for the rest of the day. And even the publicity of restaurant life, against his deepest instinct as it was, had compensations quite apart from the performance of duty. There was much to be learned from these places. The Sailor had a remarkable faculty of minute observation. The genie within never slept. Other worlds were swimming into his ken. Golden hours were being stolen from his labors, but he was gaining first-hand knowledge of men and things.

These early days of married life were in some respects the most valuable the Sailor had yet known. He was no longer living entirely in his dreams. So much was coming into his purview which he could not grasp, to which he had hardly a clue, that he had an overmastering desire for more exact information.

For example, the talk of Cora’s numerous friends was almost a foreign language, which left him as a rule with a sense of hopeless ignorance and inferiority. But this merely increased the wish to catch up. Just as a surprisingly brief four years ago he had been tormented with an almost insane desire to read and write and to learn geography and arithmetic, so now he had a terrible craving to enter a world in which Cora moved with such ease and assurance.

The chief difficulty now was the multiplicity of worlds around him. There was his own private world which none could enter but himself. That was a thing apart. It was made up of the awful memories of his youth: of Auntie, of the slushy streets of Blackhampton, of special editions, of the police, of a December night on the railway, of Mother, of Mr. Thompson, of the Old Man, of the half-deck of the Margaret Carey, of the Island of San Pedro, of the Chinaman, of Klondyke, of Ginger, of Auntie again, of Miss Foldal, of the final catastrophe; all these memories lay at he back of the world he inhabited—​these memories and the wonderful books he was always studying. Yet enthroned above them all was the Aladdin’s lamp that glowed like a star in the right-hand corner of his brain. But even that seemed to be related to other strange, ineluctable forces which lay deep down at the root of his being, in the center of which was the thing he called himself.

This private cosmos, however, wide as it was, was only an imperceptible speck of the whole. Yet it was all important, because he felt it was the only one he would ever really know. As for this world of Cora’s, it was quite outside his experience. Even the simplest objects in it did not present themselves at the same angle of vision. They were man and wife and went about together, but the worlds they inhabited were so diverse that he soon felt it would never be possible to merge them in one another.

Then, too, there was the cosmogony of Mr. Rudge. That was a vastly different matter from his own and Cora’s, and the great world of the Roc and the Domino where there was continual music and people drank things called liqueurs and wore evening clothes. Again, there was the world of his friend Mr. Ambrose, and beyond this again was the world of those wonderful people whom he used to watch with such solemn delight and curiosity when he paid his Sunday morning pilgrimages to Hyde Park.

XVII

Early in November "The Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas" was published by a firm with which Mr. Ambrose was connected. It was clear from the first that it was going to succeed. The progress of the story through the chaste pages of Brown’s had brought many new readers to that old and respected periodical. The editor made no secret of the fact that it was the best serial story the magazine had had for years, and as soon as "Dick Smith" appeared as a book it had many friends.

The notices in the papers, which Mr. Ambrose took the trouble to send to Henry Harper from time to time, were kind to the verge of indiscretion. Almost without exception they summed up the modest and unpretending story in the same way: it was a thing entirely new. The writer saw and felt life with extraordinary intensity, and he had the power of painting it with a vivid force that was astonishing. The effect was heightened by a quaintness of style which seemed to give the impression of a foreigner of great perception using a tongue with which he was unfamiliar. Yet, allowing for every defect, there was a wonderful power of narrative, not unworthy of a Bunyan or a Defoe. A spell was cast upon the reader’s mind, which made it very difficult for those who began the book to lay it down until the last page had been read.

Henry Harper was quite unconscious of the stir he had begun to make in literary circles. One aspect only of a literary success had anything to say to him at first, and that was purely monetary. Moreover, Edward Ambrose, unaffectedly proud of being the sponsor of "the new Stevenson"--a generalization so crude as to be very wide of the mark—​was wise enough to stand between the personality of this half formed but rapidly developing man of genius and the curiosity of his admirers.

The young man was more than content that Edward Ambrose should take charge of his literary affairs and "dry nurse him" through these early and in some ways very critical months of his fame. And child of nature as the Sailor was, it was a task that could only have been carried through by a man of tact and liberality of mind.

One day, at the beginning of December, when Henry Harper had been married nearly six weeks—​the visit to the Registrar round the corner in the Circus had coincided almost exactly with the book publication of the "Adventures of Dick Smith on the High Seas"--he received a letter from his friend. It said:

Bury Street, Tuesday.

MY DEAR HARPER,

If you are free, come and dine here on Friday next at eight. There will be two or three men (no ladies!), old friends, and your humble admirers, who would like very much to meet you. Do come if you can.

Yours ever, EDWARD AMBROSE.

The Sailor’s first instinct, in spite of his confidence in Mr. Ambrose and a liking for him that now amounted to affection, was to decline this invitation. He was well aware that he was not fitted by education and by social opportunity to take his place as the equal of Mr. Ambrose and his friends. Therefore, a summons even in these siren terms, worried him a good deal. It seemed disloyal to deny such a friend for such a reason; but he had learned that the genie who now accompanied him day and night wherever he went, had one very sinister quality. It had a power of making him morbidly sensitive in regard to his own deficiencies.

In order to end the state of uncertainty into which the letter had thrown him, he showed it to Cora. She advised him to accept the invitation. This Mr. Ambrose, as she knew, had helped him very much, and it would be wise, she thought, for Harry to meet these friends of his, who no doubt would be literary men like Mr. Ambrose himself.

Cora having made his mind up for him, the young man determined to do his best to lay his timidity aside. After all, there was nothing of which to be ashamed. He was what he was; and it would be the part of loyalty to a true friend to believe that no harm could come of dining with him.

All the same, the evening of Friday, December 13, was in the nature of a great ordeal for Henry Harper. Why he should have had this feeling about it was more than he could say. But having duly written and posted his acceptance, he knew no peace of mind until that ominous day was through.

The evening itself, when it came, began badly. Cora, whom he left at the door of the Roc at a little after half past seven, told him exactly how to get to Bury Street. He would have plenty of time to walk as he had not to be there until eight. But either he did not follow her instructions as carefully as he ought to have done, or he was in a chaotic state of mind, for things went hopelessly awry. He took several wrong turnings, had twice to be put right by a policeman, began to wish miserably, when it was too late, that he had taken a taxi, and in the end arrived nearly twenty minutes after eight at Edward Ambrose’s door.

It was a flustered, guilty, generally discomposed Henry Harper who was admitted by Mr. Ambrose’s servant, whom he addressed as "Sir." The host and his two other guests were waiting patiently to begin dinner.

"Here you are," said Edward Ambrose, coming forward to greet the young man almost before he was announced. "I know what has happened, so don’t apologize. No good Londoner apologizes for being late, my dear fellow." He then introduced Henry Harper to his two friends, and they went in to dinner.

The young man was so much upset at first by the absence of a dinner jacket, that he felt he must take an early opportunity of apologizing for that also. This he accordingly did with the greatest simplicity, and excused himself on the plea that he had no evening clothes at present, but was intending to get some.

Before Edward Ambrose could make any remark, his servant, of whom Henry Harper was really more in awe than of anyone else—​he looked so much more imposing than either his master or his master’s guests—​was asking whether he would have sherry.

"No, thank you, I’m teetotal," he said to the servant in answer to the invitation. "At least, I’m almost teetotal." For he suddenly remembered that since his marriage he had rather fallen away from grace, yet not to any great extent.

"Have just half a glass," said Ambrose. "I’m rather proud of this sherry, although that’s not a wise thing to say." The host laughed his rich note, which in the ear of Henry Harper was even finer than Klondyke’s, if such an admission was not sacrilege; and his two friends, to whom the latter part of his remark was addressed, echoed his laugh with notes of their own that were almost equally musical.

"A simple beverage, warranted harmless," said the host as he raised his glass, making a rather feeble attempt to secure his line of retreat.

"Plutocrat," said his friend Ellis, who was in the Foreign Office, and who dignified his leisure with writing plays.

"It’s very nice indeed, sir," said Henry Harper, speaking as he felt. He was convinced that this was the nicest wine he had ever tasted—​to be sure, he had tasted little—​and that it called for sincere commendation.

This evening was a landmark in the Sailor’s life. Nervously anxious as he had been at the outset, the ease and the simplicity of his three companions, their considered yet not too obviously considered kindness towards him, the discreet pains they took to establish him on a basis of equality, could hardly fail of their effect. Very soon Henry Harper began to respond to this new and subtly delightful atmosphere as a flower responds to the sun.

He had never imagined that any dinner could be so agreeable as this one. He had never dreamed of food so choice or cooked so deliciously, or wines of such an exquisite flavor. He had never seen a room like that, or such beautiful silver, or such flowers as those in the bowl in the center of the table. All these things addressed a clear call to the soul of Henry Harper, a call it had never heard before.

Mr. Ambrose was a delightful host, and not less delightful were his friend Mr. Ellis and his other friend Mr. Barrington, yet perhaps Mr. Portman, the servant, who bore himself with apostolic calm and dignity, was really the most wonderful of all.

Somehow, these three gentlemen, Mr. Ambrose, Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Barrington, continually recalled, by little things they said and the way in which they said them, no less a person than Mr. Esme Horrobin. And to recall that gentleman was to evoke the even more august shade of the immortal Klondyke.

By an odd chance, Mr. Esme Horrobin was to be brought to the mind of Henry Harper in a manner even more direct before dinner was over. By the time they had come to the apples and pears and Mr. Ambrose had persuaded him to have half a glass of port wine, they were all talking freely and frankly together—​Henry Harper a little less freely and frankly than the others, no doubt, but yet having settled down to enjoy himself more thoroughly than he could ever have thought to be possible—​when the name of Mr. Esme Horrobin was suddenly mentioned. It was either Mr. Ellis or Mr. Barrington who mentioned it. The young man was not sure which; indeed, throughout the evening he was not quite sure which was Mr. Ellis and which was Mr. Barrington. Anyhow, after the host had told an anecdote which made them laugh consumedly, although the Sailor was not quite able to see the point of it, Mr. Ellis-Barrington made the remark, "That story somehow reminds one of Esme Horrobin."

"Alas, poor Esme!" sighed Mr. Ellis-Barrington with mock pathos. "It’s odd, but this story of Ned’s, which really seems to handle facts rather recklessly, recalls that distinguished shade. Alas, poor Horrobin!"

All three—​Mr. Ellis, Mr. Barrington, and their host—​laughed at the mention of that name, but to the acute ear of Henry Harper it seemed that their mirth had suddenly taken a new note.

"You never met Horrobin," said Mr. Ellis-Barrington to the Sailor. "We were all at Gamaliel with him."

Mr. Ellis-Barrington was wrong to assume that Mr. Harper had never met Mr. Esme Horrobin. Mr. Harper had not been with Mr. Horrobin at Gamaliel, but he had been with him at Bowdon House.

"Oh, yes," said Mr. Harper, feeling honorably glad that he could play this part in the conversation. "I have met a Mr. Horrobin of Gamaliel College, Oxford." Somehow, the young man could not repress a thrill of pride in his excellent memory for names and places.

"Not the great Esme?" cried Mr. Ellis-Barrington with serio-comic incredulity.

"Yes, Mr. Esme Horrobin," said Henry Harper stoutly.

"Do tell us where you met the great man?" The voice of Edward Ambrose was asking the question almost as if it felt that it ought not to do so.

"I met him, sir, when I was staying at Bowdon House. He was staying there, too, and he used to talk to me about the 'Satyricon' of Petronius Arbiter and the Feast of Trimalchio."

For one brief but deadly instant, there was a pause. The odd precision with which the carefully treasured words were spoken was uncanny. But the three friends who had been with the great Esme Horrobin at Gamaliel somehow felt that an abyss had opened under their feet.

Edward Ambrose was the first to speak. But the laugh of gay charm was no longer on his lips. There was a look almost of horror in those honest eyes.

"That’s very interesting, my dear fellow," he said, with a change of tone so slight that it was hardly possible to detect it. "Interesting and curious that you should have met Horrobin." And then with a return to carelessness, as though no answer was required to a merely conventional inquiry: "What’s he doing now, do you know?"

The Sailor’s almost uncanny power of memory was equal even to that question.

"He’s bear-leading the aristocracy," said the young man, with a proud exactitude of phrase.

"Oh, really!"

But in spite of the adroitness of the host, the tact of Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Barrington’s feeling for the nuances, another pause followed. For one dark instant it was by no means clear to all three of them that their legs were not being pulled rather badly. This rare and strange young sea monster with a primeval simplicity of speech and manner, who had just absentmindedly quenched his thirst from his finger bowl, might not be all that he appeared. It seemed hardly possible to doubt the bona fides of such a curiously charming child of nature, but…​.

For another brief and deadly moment, silence reigned. But in that moment, Mr. Henry Harper, with his new and rather terrible sensitiveness, was beginning to fear that he had committed a solecism. He remembered with a pang that Marlow’s Dictionary had been unable to correlate "bear-leading" and "aristocracy." Clearly he had done wrong to make use of a phrase whose significance he did not fully understand, even though it was the phrase most certainly used by Mr. Esme Horrobin. It was pretending to a knowledge you didn’t possess, and these gentlemen who had all been to college and to whom, therefore, pretence of any kind was entirely hateful…​.

"It’s so like him!" The rare laugh of Edward Ambrose had come suddenly to the young man’s aid. But the question for gods and men was: did Mr. Ambrose mean it was so like Mr. Esme Horrobin to be bear-leading the aristocracy, or so like Mr. Henry Harper to be using a phrase whose meaning was beyond him?

"Alas, poor Esme!" sighed Mr. Ellis-Barrington.

The Sailor echoed that sigh. His relief was profound that after all a pause so deadly had not been caused by himself.

XVIII

Henry Harper at this period of his life was in the grip of a single passion; the passion to know. Already he had learned that books, wonderful, enchanting as they were, formed only one avenue to the realms of truth. He had now come to realize that there are many secrets in earth and heaven which books, even the wisest of them, are not able to disclose.

Of late, he had begun to reinforce the thousand and one volumes placed at his disposal by Mr. Rudge with the daily and weekly newspapers, and those contemporaries of Brown’s which came out once a month. He had been quite confounded by the reception given to "Dick Smith" by the public press. A thing so trivial seemed unrelated to the life of incomprehensible complexity in which he lived. Besides, he was convinced that the merit of the story had been exaggerated, as it no doubt had, in accordance with a generous custom of giving a newcomer a fair chance. Still, the author felt in his own mind that whatever the reviewers found in "Dick Smith" to admire was to be laid to the door of the friend who had made it possible for the story to reach the world.

One of the first fruits of this new craving for exact knowledge was to prove bitterly embarrassing. The Sailor had been haunted for several weeks by a report, which he had found among Mr. Rudge’s miscellaneous collection, of the royal commission which sat to inquire into the terrible case of Adolf Beck. He became obsessed by the thought that the apparatus of the criminal law in a free country could fasten bonds on an entirely innocent person, could successfully resist all attempts to cast them off, and when finally pinned down and exposed to public censure could easily evoke a second line of defense, which, under juridical forms, freed it of blame in the matter.

To such an extent did the affair react upon the Sailor’s mind that when he called one afternoon upon Edward Ambrose in Pall Mall, he had to make a sad confession. He had been so much troubled by it that he had not been able to work.

"Ah, but there we come to the core of official England," said Edward Ambrose. "Such miscarriages of justice happen in every country in the world, but the commission which solemnly justifies them on the ground of indisputable common sense could only have happened in this land of ours."

The young man was grateful for the tone of indignation. It was something to know there was one man in the world who agreed in sum with a certain trite formula which was all he had to work by. It had come to him by accident on the Margaret Carey…​. Right is right, and wrong is no man’s right.

"You should go to the Old Bailey one day and hear a trial," said Edward Ambrose. "All things that are concerned with reality might help you just now. I dare say it will hurt you horribly; but if you are not unlucky in the judge, it may help to restore your faith in your country."

"Yes, sir, I’ll go there one day, as you advise me to," said Henry Harper, as a boy in the fourth form who was young for his age might have said it; and then with curious simplicity: "But I won’t much fancy going by myself."

"I’ll come with you," said Edward Ambrose, "if that is how you feel about it."

Thus it was that one evening, about a fortnight later, Henry Harper received a postcard, which said:

Meet me outside O. B. 10.30 tomorrow. Murder trial: a strange and terrible drama of passion for two students of the human comedy! E. A.

On the following morning, the Sailor had already mingled with the crowd outside the Old Bailey when, punctual to the minute, he was joined by his friend.

"It’s brave of you to face it," was his greeting.

Mr. Ambrose little knew the things he had faced in the course of his five and twenty years of life, was the thought that ran in the mind of the Sailor.

They made their way in, and became witnesses of the drama that the law was preparing to unfold.

The judge began the proceedings, or rather the proceedings began themselves, with a kind of grotesque dignity. After the jury had been sworn, the prisoner was brought into the dock. Henry Harper gazed at him with an emotion of dull horror. In an instant, he had recognized Mr. Thompson, the mate of the Margaret Carey.

There could be no doubt it was he. Alexander Thompson was the name given in the indictment; besides, the Sailor would have known anywhere that shaggy and hirsute man who had cast such a shadow across his youth. There he was, that grim figure! He had changed, and yet he had not changed. The long, lean, angular body was the same in every awkward line, but the deadly pallor of the face was horrible to see. It was Mr. Thompson right enough, and yet it was not Mr. Thompson at all.

A surge of memories came upon Henry Harper as he sat in that court. They were so terrible that he could hardly endure them. He did not hear a word that was being spoken by the barrister who, in even and impartial tones, was reciting the details of a savage but not ignoble crime. The Sailor was thousands of miles away in the Pacific; the groves of the Island of San Pedro were rising through the morning mists; he could hear the plop-plop of the sharks in the water; he could hear the Old Man coming up on deck.

"That man looks capable of anything," whispered Edward Ambrose.

The Sailor had always been clear upon that point. There was the drive to the docks in a cab through the rain of the November night in his mind. Again he was a helpless waif of the streets seated opposite Jack the Ripper. He almost wanted to scream.

"Would you rather not stay?" whispered his friend.

"I’m not feeling very well," said Henry Harper; thereupon they left the court and went out into the street.

They walked along Holborn in complete silence. To the Sailor the fellowship, the security, the friendliness of that crowded street were a great relief. His soul was in the grip of awful memories. Even the man at his side could not dispel them. Mr. Ambrose was much farther away just now than the Old Man, the Island of San Pedro, and the savage and brutal murderer to whom he owed his life.

For days afterwards, the mind of the Sailor was dominated by Mr. Thompson. He learned from the newspapers that the mate of the Margaret Carey was condemned to death, and that he awaited the last office of the law in Dalston Prison. One day, an odd impulse came upon him. He bought some grapes and took them to the prison, and with a boldness far from his character at ordinary times, sought permission to see the condemned man.

As Mr. Thompson had only one day more to live, and not one of his friends had visited him for the simple reason that he had not a friend in the world, the governor of the prison, a humane man, gave the Sailor permission to see the mate of the Margaret Carey.

Behind iron bars and in the presence of a warder, Henry Harper was allowed to look upon Mr. Thompson, to speak to him, and to offer the grapes he had brought him. But a dreadful shock awaited the young man. He saw at once that there was nothing human now in the man who was ranging his cell like a caged beast.

"Don’t you know me, Mr. Thompson?" cried Henry Harper feebly, through the bars.

The mate of the Margaret Carey paid no heed to his voice, but still paced up and down.

"Don’t you know me, Mr. Thompson? I’m Sailor."

For a fraction of time, the condemned man turned savage, unutterable eyes upon him. They were those of a wild beast at bay.

"There’s no God," he said.

He dashed his head against the wall of his cell.

XIX

Henry Harper was now in a universe of infinite complexity. The genie who lived in the wonderful lamp in his brain had taught him already that he knew nothing about whole stellar spaces in this strange cosmos that he, the thing he called himself, inhabited. Moreover, it presented many problems. Of these the most instant and pressing was Cora.

It was no use mincing the matter: Cora and he were not getting on. There was no bond of sympathy between them. His work and all that went with it were far more to him than the woman he had married. And when this fact came home to her, she began to resent it in a contemptuous way. It made it more difficult for both that his work only appealed to her in one aspect, and that the one which least appealed to him. The hard and continuous labor it involved meant nothing to her; the hopes and the fears of an awakening artistic sense were things beyond her power to grasp; if his work had not a definite commercial value, if it could not be rendered in pounds and shillings, it was a waste of time and worse than meaningless. Everything apart from that was a closed book as far as she was concerned. She began to despise his timidity and his ignorance, and the time soon came when she did not hesitate to sneer at him before her friends.

For one thing, she was bitterly resentful. It was useless to disguise that he was not merely indifferent to her physical charms, he positively disliked and even dreaded that aspect of their life together. Within a very short time after their marriage, he made the discovery that she drank.

Even before that knowledge came he had discerned something unwholesome about her. The blackened eyebrows, the rouged cheeks, the dyed hair, the overfine presence, the stealthy, cloying color of scent she exuded, the coarse mouth, the apathetic eyes, had always been things that he dared not let his mind rest upon in detail even before he had taken them unto himself. And now that he had done so at the call of duty, and with even that to sustain him, he foresaw that he must come to dislike them more and more. It hardly needed a pervading reek of brandy in her bedroom to read the future.

Unluckily for Cora, the monotony of a "straight" life with such a humdrum young man was more than she could stand for any length of time. The old fatal habit was soon upon her again. Years of yielding had weakened her will; and now she was beginning to grow contemptuous of her husband—​perhaps as a requital of his apathy towards her—​she began to assume a defiant carelessness, first of manner and then of conduct.

Disaster was foreshadowed by several quarrels. None of these were serious, but they showed the inevitable end towards which matters had begun to drift. Henry Harper was not the sort of man with whom it was easy to quarrel; he had no aptitude for a form of reflex action quite alien to his nature. All the same, there were times when he was almost tempted to defend himself from Cora’s perpetual sneers at his dullness, not only in her company, which was bad enough, but in that of her friends, which was worse.

Her chief complaint was his bearing in restaurants and public places. He had not a word to say for himself; he let "the girls" and "the boys"--Cora included her whole exceedingly numerous acquaintance in these terms--"come it over him"; he took everything lying down; and she couldn’t understand why a man who was as clever as he was supposed to be "didn’t let himself out a bit now and again."

Harry’s social maladroitness became a very sore subject. It annoyed Cora intensely that the boys and the girls should so consistently "make a mark of him." His inability to hit back seemed to be a grave reflection upon her judgment and good taste in marrying him. The time soon came when she told him that if he couldn’t show himself a little brighter in company, he could either stay at home of an evening or go his way, and she would go hers.

As a fact, neither alternative was irksome to Henry Harper. But the ultimatum hurt him very much. The odd thing was that in spite of the nipping atmosphere to which his sensitiveness was exposed, it seemed to grow more acute. He had a very real sense of inferiority in the presence of others. Not only did he suffer from a lack of any kind of social training, but even the few counters he was painfully acquiring in a difficult game he had not the art of playing to advantage. Thus he was only too glad to accept Cora’s ukase. It was a merciful relief to sit at home in the evening and eat the meager cold supper that Royal Daylight provided, and then go on with his work to what hour he chose, instead of being haled abroad at the heels of a superfashionable and therefore hyperdisdainful Cora to public places, where he was always at a miserable disadvantage.

She thus formed a habit of sallying forth alone in the evening. Although she sometimes returned after midnight in a slightly elevated condition, or in her own words, "inclined to be market merry," her husband had too little knowledge of life to be really suspicious or even deeply resentful.

Under the new arrangement, which suited the young man so well, he was able to attend public lectures at various places, the Polytechnic in Regent Street, the British Museum, the London Institution, the South Kensington Museum, and other centers of light. These helped him in certain ways. He was no dry-as-dust. Already his eyes were set towards the mountain peaks, yet with a humility that was perhaps his chief asset, he felt it to be in the power of all men to help him upon his journey.

Twice a week, now, after an early supper, he would go to a lecture. When it was over, he would often take a stroll about the streets in order to observe the phantasmagoria around him of which he knew so little. Yet his eager mind was looking forward to a time when all should be made clear by the play of the light that shines in darkness.

As a rule, he would finish his evening’s excursion with a cup of coffee and a sandwich at Appenrodt’s in Oxford Circus. And then thinking his wonderful thoughts, he would take a final enchanted stroll homewards to the Avenue, to No. 106, King John’s Mansions, where his work and his books awaited him. Sometimes, however, he was greatly troubled with the thought of Cora. It was idle to disguise the ever growing sense of antagonism that was arising between them. But she went her way and he went his. The financial arrangement they had now come to was that he should pay the rent of the flat and all household expenses, and as Cora had apparently no money of her own, he also allowed her half of what remained of his income.

One evening in the summer, as he was walking slowly down Regent Street, a man and a woman passed him in an open taxi. The woman was Cora, and the man, who was in evening dress, appeared to have his arm around her waist. The sight was like a blow in the face. And yet it was a thing so far outside his ken that it was impossible to know exactly what it meant. For a moment he was dazed. He did not know how to regard it, or in what way to deal with it. To begin with, and perhaps oddly, it did not make him particularly angry. Why he was not more angry, he didn’t know. No doubt it was because he was growing to dislike Cora so intensely. But as he walked slowly to King John’s Mansions he still had the curious feeling of being half stunned by a blow.

He went to bed without awaiting her return. She had recently taken to coming home very late. Partly because of this, and partly in consequence of the condition in which she often returned, he had insisted for some little time past upon a bedroom of his own. This she had been very unwilling to concede, but he had fought for it and had in the end won; and tonight as he turned in and locked the door, he determined that no power on earth should cause him to yield the spoils of victory. He got into bed with hideous phantoms in his mind. But the thought uppermost was that he had turned yet another page of experience. And there suddenly in the midst of the flow and eddy of his fancies, the awful face of Mr. Thompson emerged at the foot of the bed. He could almost hear the mate of the Margaret Carey dash his head against the wall of his cell.

He put forth all his power of will in the hope of inducing sleep, but before it showed signs of coming, he heard Cora’s latchkey fumbling at the front door of the flat. She opened it with a rattle, and closed it with a bang; and then he heard her come stumbling along the passage, her fuddled voice uplifted in the mirthless strain of a music hall ditty.

With a sensation of physical nausea, he heard her try the handle of the bedroom door. And then there came a knock.

"Let me in, ducky."

He didn’t answer, but pulled the bedclothes over his head.

"Let me in, ducky. I want to kiss you good night."

In spite of the bedclothes, he could still hear her.

Receiving no answer, she beat upon the door again.

"Don’t then"--he could still hear her--"You are no good, anyway."

She then stumbled to her own room singing "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" with cheerful defiance, and slammed the door.

XX

The next day Cora was not visible until about two o’clock, which was now her invariable rule. They lunched together. He could hardly bring himself to eat the comfortless meal with her. But, after all, he had taken her for better or for worse. He must keep his part of the contract, therefore it was no use being squeamish.

He waited until the meal was over and Royal Daylight had cleared the table, and had also cleared away herself, before he mentioned the taxi. And then very bluntly, and in a tone entirely new to her as well as to himself, he demanded an explanation.

Cora, it seemed, was in a rather chastened mood. For one thing, she was now sober, and when she was sober she was not exactly a fool. She was not really repentant. He was too poor a thing to make a self-respecting woman repent. But now she was again herself, she was both shrewd and wary; after all, this double-adjectival idiot was the goose that laid the golden eggs.

"I was a bit on last night," she said, with well-assumed humility.

[Illustration: "'I was a bit on last night,' she said, with well-assumed humility."]

"Yes, I heard you was when you come home," he said, with the new note in his voice that she didn’t like.

"Oh, so you did hear." She suddenly determined to carry the war into the enemy’s country. "Why didn’t you open it, then?"

The cold impudence stung.

"I’d rather have died than have opened it to a cow like you." He hardly knew the words he used. They had seemed to spring unbidden from the back of beyond.

She half respected him for speaking to her in that way, and in such a tone; there was perhaps a little more to the double-adjectival one than she had guessed. And as the cards were dead against her now, she decided on a strategic grovel of pathos and brandy.

"Call yourself a gentleman?" Tears sprang reluctantly to the raddled cheek.

The sight of a lady in tears, even a lady who drank, was a little too much for Henry Harper.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I oughtn’t to have said that." He had remembered that the word "cow" as applied to the female sex was a Blackhampton expression and a favorite with Auntie.

The lady could only weep a little more profusely. This mug was as soft as butter.

He stood looking at her with tight lips and with eyes of sorrowful disgust.

"But you’ve no right to drink as much as you do," he said, determinedly. "And you’ve no right to ride in taxis with gentlemen and to let them put their arms round you."

"And you’ve no right to call your own lawful wife a cow," she said, tearfully.

"I’ve apologized for that," he said. "But you’ve given me no explanation of that gentleman."

"Didn’t I say I was a bit on," she said aggrievedly.

"It’s no excuse. It makes it worse."

"Yes, it does," said Mrs. Henry Harper, with a further grovel, "if it happened. But it didn’t happen. You was mistaken, Harry. I’m too much the lady to let any gentleman, whether he was in evening dress or whether he wasn’t, put his arm around me in a taxi. I wouldn’t think of it now I’m married. Now, you kiss your Cora, Harry, for calling her a name."

She approached him with pursed lips. In spite of the shame he felt for such a lapse from his official duties, he retreated slowly before her.

"It’s no use denying it," he said, as soon as the table had been placed successfully between them. "I saw his arm round you."

"You are mistaken, Harry." She did not like the look or the sound of him. She was beginning to be alarmed at her own folly. "I may have been a bit on, but I was not as bad as that. Honest."

"I saw what I saw," he persisted; and then feeling no longer able to cope with her or the situation, he slipped out of the room and out of the flat.

He had now to look forward in a dim way to the time when he would have to leave her. The time was not yet, but he was beginning to feel in the very marrow of his bones that it was near. Now that her secret was out and a hopeless deterioration had begun, there was something so revolting in the whole thing that he foresaw already their life together could have only one end. But in the meantime, he must be man enough to keep with a stiff upper lip a contract he ought never to have made.

Apart from his domestic relations, things were going very well indeed with him. He had completed the "Further Adventures of Dick Smith" to the satisfaction of Mr. Ambrose, and it was on the point of starting in the magazine. Moreover, the first series had won fame on both sides of the Atlantic. It was felt, so rare was its merits, that if Henry Harper never wrote anything else his reputation was secure for twenty years.

This, of course, was an amazing piece of fortune. Edward Ambrose, who had had no small share in bringing it about, and whose discriminating friendship had made it possible, compared it, in his own mind, with the success of Dickens, who, after a life of poverty and hardship, gained immortality at five and twenty. It was far too soon as yet to predict such a crown for Henry Harper, but he had certainly burst upon the world as a full-fledged literary curiosity. His name was coming to be in the mouth of all who could appreciate real imagination.

One of the first fruits of this success was his election to the Stylists' Club. This distinguished and esoteric body met on the afternoon of the first Tuesday of the autumn and winter months at Paradine’s Hotel in Upper Brook Street, Berkeley Square, to discuss Style. Literary style only was within the scope of its reference; at the same time, the members of the club carried Style into all the appurtenances of their daily lives. Not only were they stylists on paper, they were stylists in manner, in dress, in speech, in mental outlook. The club was so select that it was limited to two hundred members, as it was felt there was never likely to be more than that number of persons in the metropolis at any one time who could be expected to possess an authentic voice upon the subject. Happily, these were not all confined to one sex. The club included ladies.

That the Stylists' Club, of all human institutions, should have sought out Henry Harper for the signal honor of membership, seemed a rare bit of byplay on the part of Providence. For a reason which he could not explain, Edward Ambrose gave a hoot of delight when the young man brought to him the club’s invitation, countersigned by its president, the supremely distinguished Mr. Herbert Gracious, whose charmingly urbane "Appreciations," issued biennially, were known wherever the English language was in use. Mr. Herbert Gracious was not merely a stylist himself, he was a cause of style in others.

Henry Harper had been a little troubled at first by the hoot of Mr. Ambrose, and the feeling of doubt it inspired was not made less by a rather lame defense. All the same, Mr. Ambrose so frankly respected the young man’s intense desire to improve himself that he urged him to join the club, and to attend the first meeting, at any rate, of the new session, if he felt he would get the least good out of it.

In response to a basely utilitarian suggestion, Henry Harper said he would do so. He was not in a frame of mind to face such an ordeal. But he must not let go of himself. Miserable as he was, he felt he must take such advice if only to prove his courage. He would attend the first meeting of the Stylists' Club on the ground of its being good for the character, if on no higher.

"I suppose you’ll be there, sir?"

"No," laughed Mr. Ambrose. "I’m not a member. It’s a very distinguished body."

Henry Harper looked incredulous. It did not occur to him that anybody could be so distinguished as to exclude such a man as Edward Ambrose.

"I don’t think I’ll go, then," said Henry Harper. "It will be a bit lonesome-like."

"Please do. And then come and tell me about it. Your personal impression will be valuable."

It was for this reason that the Sailor finally decided not to show the white feather.

XXI

Henry Harper found the Stylists' Club of far greater interest than he thought it would be. To one as simple as he it was a very stimulating body. Moving precariously towards fresh standards of life, he knew at once that he was in a strange new world. He knew even before a powdered footman had led him across the parqueted floors of Paradine’s Hotel, and a personage hardly less gorgeous had announced him to the congeries of stylists who had assembled to the number of about sixty.

"It is such a pleasure, Mr. Harper," said a large, florid, benign and beaming gentleman, seizing him by the hand. "You will find us all at your feet."

Mr. Harper was overawed not a little by the size and the distinction of the company, but the benign and beaming gentleman, who was no less a person than Mr. Herbert Gracious himself, took him in charge and introduced him to several other gentlemen, most of whom were benign but not beaming, being rather obviously preoccupied with a sense of Style. Indeed, Mr. Herbert Gracious was the only one of its members who did beam really. The others were far too deeply engaged with the momentous matters they had met to consider.

When Mr. Henry Harper had been allowed to subside into a vacant chair in the midst of six stylists, four of whom were female and two of whom were male, he was able to pull himself together a little. He knew already that he was in very deep waters indeed: Mr. Esme Horrobins and Mr. Edward Ambroses were all around him. And these ladies …​ these ladies who waved eyeglasses stuck on sticks were not of the Cora and the Miss Press and the Miss Bonser breed; they were of the sort that Klondyke put on a high hat and a swallowtail to walk with in Hyde Park. Yes, even for a sailor, he was in very deep waters just now, and he was obliged to tell himself once again, as he always did in such circumstances, that having sailed six years before the mast there was nothing in the world to fear.

All the same, at first he was very far from being happy. A dozen separate yet correlated discussions upon Style had been interrupted by his entrance. The announcement, "Mr. Henry Harper," had suspended every conversation. For a moment all the Mr. Esme Horrobins were mute and inglorious. But then, having glutted their gaze upon one whom Mr. Herbert Gracious himself had already crowned in the Literary Supplement of the Daily Age and Lyre, the Mr. Esme Horrobins and the Mrs. Esme Horrobins—​the mere male was not allowed to have it all his own way in this discussion upon Style—​took up the theme.

It was the part of Mr. Henry Harper to listen. The public press of England and America had compared his own style to that of Stevenson, Bunyan, Defoe, the Bible, Shakespeare, Laetitia Longborn Gentle, Memphis Mortmain Mimpriss, finally Dostoievsky, and then Stevenson again. In a true analysis Stevenson would have defeated all the other competitors together, leaving out Dostoievsky, who was a bad second, and excluding the Bible, Shakespeare, and Memphis Mortmain Mimpriss, who, to their great discredit, were an equally bad third. Stevenson was first and the rest nowhere. And there that glorious reincarnation sat, in a modest blue suit, but looking very neat and clean, listening to every word that fell in his vicinity from the lips of the elect. At least, that was, as far as it was possible for one human pair of ears to do so.

"Tell me, Mr. Harper," said Miss Carinthia Small, with all Kensington upon her eyebrows, imperiously attacking with a stick eyeglass, which she wobbled ferociously, this very obvious young genius who didn’t know how to dress properly, as soon as Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard—​M.B. of the Stylists' Review--had allowed her, much against his will and for purely physical reasons, to get in a word. "Tell me, Mr. Harper, exactly how you feel about Dostoievsky? Where do you place him? Before Meredith and after Cuthbert Rampant, or before Cuthbert Rampant and after Thomas Hardy?"

It was a dismal moment for Mr. Henry Harper. Fortunately he hesitated for a fraction of an instant, and he was saved. That infinitesimal period of time had given Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard his chance to get in again. And stung by the public acclamation of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, a well-nourished young man in a checked cravat, who was curving gracefully over Miss Carinthia Small, he proceeded to show with some little violence, yet without loss of temper, that in any discussion of style qua style, Turgenieff alone of the Russians could possibly count.

"But everybody knows," breathed the defiant Miss Carinthia in the charmed ear of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant, "that had it not been for Dostoievsky, the 'Adventures of Dick Smith' could never have been written at all."

The considered reply of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant was lost in the boom and the rattle of Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard’s heavy artillery.

Henry Harper might have sailed six years upon the high seas, but a flood of deep and perplexing waters was all around him now. Stylists to right of him, stylists to left of him, all discoursing ex cathedra upon that supreme quality. Never, since the grim days of the Margaret Carey had he felt a sterner need to keep cool and hold his wits about him. But with the native shrewdness that always stood to him in a crisis, he had grasped already a very important fact. It must be the task just now of the new Stevenson to sit tight and say nothing.

To this resolve he kept honorably. And it was less difficult than it might have been had not Style alone been the theme of their discourse, had not this been an authentic body of its practitioners, and had not "The Adventures of Dick Smith" been acclaimed as the finest example of pure narrative seen for many a year. All through the period of tea and cake, which Mr. Henry Harper contrived to hand about with the best of them, being honestly determined not to mind his inferior clothes and absence of manner, because, after all, these things were less important than they seemed at the moment, he kept perfectly mute.

Nevertheless he had one brief lapse. It was after he had drunk a cup of tea and the undefeated Miss Carinthia Small had drunk several, and Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard had retired in gallant pursuit of some watercress sandwiches, that the dauntless lady felt it to be her duty to draw him out.

"Tell me, Mr. Harper," said she, "what really led you to Stevenson?"

So much was the novice troubled by the form of the question that she decided to restate it in a simpler one, although heaven knew it was simple enough already!

"What is your favorite Stevenson?" she asked, looking Mr. Cuthbert Rampant full in the eye with an air of the complete Amazon.

The author of "The Adventures of Dick Smith" was bound to speak then. Unfortunately he spoke to his own undoing.

"I’ve only read one book by Stevisson," he said, in a voice of curious penetration which nervousness had rendered loud and strident.

"Pray, which is that?" asked Miss Carinthia Small in icy tones.

"It’s the one called 'Virginibus Puerisk,'" said Mr. Henry Harper.

Miss Carinthia Small felt that a pin might have been heard to fall in Upper Brook Street, Berkeley Square. Mr. Cuthbert Rampant shared her emotion. Yet the area of the fatal silence did not extend beyond Mr. Marmaduke Buzzard, who had already reopened fire a short distance away, and was again doing immense execution.

Miss Carinthia Small and Mr. Cuthbert Rampant risked no further discussion of Stevisson with this strange young Visigoth from the back of beyond. Neither of them could have believed it to be possible. When he had been first ushered into the room by the benign Herbert, and had modestly sat down, he had looked so clean and neat, and anxious to efface himself that he might have been a product of some self-respecting modern university who was on a reconnaissance from a garden suburb. But how could that have been their thought! This was a cruel trick that somebody had played upon Herbert. There was malice in it, too. Dear Herbert, England’s only critic, the British Sainte Beuve, had had his leg pulled in a really wicked manner! He had always prided himself upon being democratic and inclusive, but there was a limit to everything.

Happily the Sailor did not stay much longer. Many stylists were going already. It had been an interesting experience for the young man. If he had gained nothing beyond a cup of lukewarm tea and a cucumber sandwich, he certainly felt very glad that he had had the courage to face it.

"Good-by, ma’am," he said, squeezing a delicate white glove in a broad and powerful grip. "I’m very proud to have met you. What else ought I to read of Stevisson?"

Miss Carintha Small felt an inclination to laugh. But yet there was something that saved him. What it was she didn’t know. She only knew it was something that Winchester and New College in the person of Mr. Cuthbert Rampant did not possess.

"Good-by." There was really very little of the stylist in her voice, although she was not aware of it, and would have been quite mortified had such been the case. "And you must read 'Treasure Island.' It is exactly your style, although 'Dick Smith' is very much deeper and truer and to my mind altogether more sincere."

Miss Carinthia Small had not meant to say a word of this. She had not meant to say anything. She had intended to efface this young man altogether.

The Sailor threaded his way through a perfect maze of stylists with almost a sense of rapture. It had been a delightful adventure to converse on equal terms with a real Hyde Park Lady: a brilliant creature who had neither chaffed him nor hit him in the back, nor addressed him as "Greased Lightning," nor had rebuked him with "Damn you." He walked out on air.

As the author of "The Adventures of Dick Smith" was retrieving his hat from the hotel cloak room, he was suddenly brought to earth. Two really imperial stylists were being assisted into elaborate fur coats by two stylists among footman.

"My dear Herbert." An abnormally quick ear caught the half humorous, half indignant remark, in spite of the fact that it was uttered in a very low tone. "This man Harper …​ I assure you the fellow hasn’t an aitch to his name."

XXII

It was not until Henry Harper had escaped from Paradine’s Hotel and had managed to find a way into Regent Street that the words he had overheard seemed to hit him between the eyes. His mind had been thrown back years, to Klondyke and the waterlogged bunk in the half-deck of the Margaret Carey. He recalled as in a dream the great argument he had dared to maintain as to the true manner of spelling his name, and how, finally, he had been compelled to give in. Ever since that time, he had always put in the aitch in deference to his friend’s superior artillery, which included Greek and Latin and other surprising things.

It was clear, however, that it was not a bit of use putting the letter aitch in your name unless you included it in your speech as well. It was amazing that he had not grasped such a simple truth until that moment. He had known, of course, for some little time now, in fact, ever since he had met Mr. Esme Horrobin at Bowdon House that his manner of speaking only very faintly resembled that in vogue in college and society circles.

On the edge of the curb at Piccadilly Circus, waiting to make the perilous crossing to the Avenue, the crushing force of the remark he had overheard seemed to come right home to him. Moreover, as he stood there he saw in an almost fantastically objective way that the letter aitch should be attended to at once. He must not be content merely to improve his mind, he must improve himself in every possible manner.

It was here, as he stood in deep thought, that his old friend Providence came rather officiously to his aid. A derelict walked past him in the gutter, and on the back of the human wreck was fixed a sandwich board bearing the legend:

Madame Sadleir gives lessons daily by appointment in voice production, elocution, correct speaking, and deportment. Apply for terms at 12, Portugal Place, W.

This was very friendly of Providence. The young man knew that two minutes ago he had passed Portugal Place. He was strung up to the point of adventure. This too long neglected matter was so vital to one who desired to mix with stylists on equal terms, that it would be the part of wisdom to see about it now.

At this moment thought was action with Henry Harper. Therefore he turned almost at once and retraced his steps into Regent Street. Within a very short time he was assailing the bell pull of 12, Portugal Place, W., third floor.

Providence had arranged that Madame Sadleir should be at home. She was alone, moreover, in her professional chamber, and fully prepared to enter into the matter of the letter aitch.

Madame Sadleir was stout and elderly, she wore an auburn wig, she was calm and efficient, yet she also had an indefinable quality of style. In spite of a certain genial grotesqueness she had an air of superiority. Henry Harper, his vibrant sensibilities still astretch from an afternoon of stylists, perceived at once that this was a lady with more or less of a capital letter.

Experience of Cora and her friends had by this time taught the Sailor that there were "common or garden" ladies, to use a favorite expression of Miss Press, and there were also those he defined as real or Hyde Park ladies. He had little first-hand knowledge, at present, of the latter; he merely watched them from afar and marked their deportment in public places. But there was a subtle quality in the greeting of Madame Sadleir, almost a caricature to look at as she was, which suggested the presence of a lady with a capital letter, at least with more or less of a capital letter, a sort of Hyde Park lady relapsed. Henry Harper was aware, almost before Madame Sadleir spoke a word, that she had been born to better things than 12, Portugal Place, W., third floor.

Completely disarmed by the calm but forthcoming manner of Madame Sadleir, Mr. Henry Harper stated his modest need with extreme simplicity. He just wanted to be taught in as few lessons as possible to speak like a real college gentleman that went regular—​regularly (remembering his grammar in time)--into Society.

Madame Sadleir’s smile was maternal.

"Why, certainly," she said in the voice of a dove. "Nothing easier."

The young man felt reassured. He had not thought, even in his moments of optimism, that there would be anything easy in the process of making a Mr. Edward Ambrose or a Mr. Esme Horrobin.

"It will be necessary," said Madame Sadleir, "to pay very particular attention to the course of instruction, and also to practice assiduously. But first you must learn to take breath and to assemble and control the voice. Do you desire the Oxford manner?"

Mr. Henry Harper, with recollections of Mr. Edward Ambrose and Mr. Esme Horrobin, said modestly that he did desire the Oxford manner if it could be acquired in a few lessons, which was yet more than he dared to hope.

"The number of lessons depends entirely upon your diligence and, may I add"--and Madame Sadleir did add--"your intelligence and natural aptitude. But, of course, to remove all misunderstanding, the Oxford manner is an extra."

Somehow he felt that such would be the case.

"Personally, one doesn’t recommend it," said Mtdame Sadleir, "for general use."

Mr. Harper was a little disappointed.

"It is not quite so popular as it was," said Madame Sadleir, "unless one is going into the Church. In the Church it is always in vogue, in fact one might say a sine qua non in its higher branches. Do you propose to take Orders?"

Mr. Harper had no thoughts of a commercial life.

"Personally," said Madame Sadleir, speaking with the most engaging freedom and ease, "one is inclined to favor a good Service manner for all round general use. There is the A manner for the army subaltern, the B manner for the company officer, either of which you will find admirable for general purposes. There is also the Naval manner, but excellent as it is, I am afraid it is hardly to be recommended for social life. The Civil Service manner, which combines utility with a reasonable amount of ornament, might suit you perhaps. I am recommending it quite a good deal just now. And, of course, there is the Diplomatic or Foreign Office manner for advanced pupils, but it may be early days to talk of that at present. One does not like to raise false hopes or to promise more than one can perform. Now, Mr. Harper, kindly let me hear you read this leading article in the Times on 'What is Wrong with the Nation?' paying particular attention to the vowel sounds."

With grave deliberation, Mr. Henry Harper did as he was asked. Having painfully completed his task, Madame Sadleir, in a remarkably benign way, which somehow brought Mr. Herbert Gracious vividly to his mind, proceeded to deal with him with the utmost fidelity.

Said she: "It is my duty to tell you that for the present a good sound No. 3 Commercial manner is earnestly recommended. If you are diligent, it may be possible to graft a modified Oxford upon it, but I am afraid it would be premature to promise even that."

This was disappointing. But, after all, it was to be foreseen. Mr. Edward Ambroses and Mr. Esme Horrobins were not made in a day. And when he came to think the matter over at his leisure he was sincerely glad that they were not. It would have taken a mystery and a glamour from the world.

XXIII

About this time, Henry Harper became a member of a society which met once a week at Crosbie’s in the Strand. This step was the outcome of a course of lectures he had attended at the London Ethical Institution, in Bloomsbury Square. They had been delivered by the very able Professor Wynne Davies, on that most fascinating of all subjects to the truly imaginative mind, the Idea of God.

During these lectures, and quite by chance, Henry Harper had made the acquaintance of a certain Arthur Reeves, a young journalist, who suggested that he should join the Social Debating Society, which met at Crosbie’s every Tuesday. This he accordingly did; and being under no obligation to take an active part in the proceedings until he felt he could do so with reasonable credit, he was able to enjoy them thoroughly. Moreover, he was in full sympathy with these alert minds which for the most part were owned by young and struggling men.

Some of the discussions Henry Harper heard at Crosbie’s made a deep impression upon him. All the members seemed to have a turn for speculative inquiry. The majority of those who took an active part in the debates spoke very well. Now and again, it is true, the pride of intellect raised its head. Some of its members were young enough to know everything, but there was also a leaven of older minds which saw life more steadily, and in as rounded a shape as it is possible for the eye of man to perceive it.

There was one man in particular who attracted Henry Harper. His name was James Thorneycroft, and he was in his way a rare bird, a bank manager with a strong ethical and sociological bias. He was one of the graybeards of the society, a man of sixty, who had the worn look of one who had been fighting devils, more or less unsuccessfully, all his life. For Henry Harper there was fascination and inspiration in James Thorneycroft. His was a mind capable of delving deep into spiritual experience, and of rendering it in terms which all could understand.

At the third meeting which Henry Harper attended at Crosbie’s, his friend and introducer, Arthur Reeves, under the spell cast by the brilliant Professor Wynne Davies, ventured to combat a certain skepticism in regard to the scope and function of the Deity, which some of the advanced members had put into words at the previous meeting.

The performance of Arthur Reeves was crude and rather unphilosophical, and yet it was stimulating enough to bring James Thorneycroft on to his legs.

"My own view about God is this," he began in that curiously unpremeditated and abrupt way which made an effect of absolute sincerity. "There is a form of inherited belief that will overthrow the most fearless and independent mind if it ventures to disregard it. I suppose most men who think at all are up against this particular problem some time in their lives. But it all comes back to this: it is absolutely impossible for any man to banish the idea of God and continue as a reasoning entity. Of the First Cause we know nothing, of the Ultimate Issue we know even less, but my own faith is that as long as the idea of God persists, Man himself will not perish. I know there are many who will say that science is against me. They will say that there is nothing inherent in the mere idea of God which will or can prevent an earthquake banishing all forms of organic life from this planet in sixty seconds. Well, it is my faith that if that came to pass Man would still persist in some other form. Science would at once rejoin that he would cease to be Man, but to my own psychic experience that is not at all a clear proposition. Science is based upon reason which states as an absolute fact that two and two make four. The idea of God is based upon the fact that two and two plus One make five, and all the science and all the clear and exact thinking in the world can’t alter it. Man is only a reasoning animal up to a point. He has only to keep exclusively to reason to bring about his own defeat. Every thinking mind, I assume, must oscillate at some period of its development between Reason on the one hand (two and two make four) and Experience (two and two make five) on the other. Well, if it won’t bore you" …​ "Go on, go on!" cried the meeting, not out of politeness merely, since all felt the fascination of the unconventional and childlike personality of James Thorneycroft…​. "I will give you in as few words as I can the experience that happened to me nearly thirty years ago, which laid at rest all doubts I might ever have had on this point.

"At that time I was a clerk in a bank at Blackhampton. Employed at the bank was a young porter." …​

For a reason he could never explain, a strange thrill suddenly ran through Henry Harper.

"…​ And this young chap was one of the best and most promising fellows I ever met. He belonged to the working class, but he was tremendously keen to improve himself. When I met him first he couldn’t even read—​it makes one smile to hear people talk about the good old days!--but he very soon learned, and then he began to worry things out for himself. I lent him one or two books myself …​ John Stuart Mill, I remember, and that old fool Carlyle, who ruled the roast at that time."--Here a bearded gentleman at the back had to be called to order.--"Then we both began to get into deeper waters, and with assistance from Germany, soon found ourselves in a flood of isms, although I am bound to say without being able to make very much of them.

"The time came, however, when this young man, who was really a very fine fellow, took the wrong turning. He somehow got entangled with a woman, a thoroughly bad lot I afterwards found out, a person of a type much below his own. He was an extraordinarily simple chap, he had the heart of a child. From a mistaken, an utterly mistaken sense of chivalry, he finally married her.

"If ever a man was imposed upon and entrapped it was this poor fellow. Of course he didn’t know that at first. But from the hour of his marriage deterioration set in. Ambition and all desire for self-improvement began to go. Then he lost his mental poise, and he became cynical, and no wonder, because that woman made his life a hell. Even when the truth came to him he stuck to her, really I think out of some quixotic notion he had of reforming her. Certainly he stuck to her long after he ought to have, because slowly but surely she began to drag him down. At last, when the full truth came home to him, he killed her in a sudden fit of madness.

"Now, there was no real evil in that man. There were one or two soft places in him, no doubt, as there are in most of us, but it is my firm belief that had he married the right woman he would one day have been a credit to his country. He was in every way a very fine fellow—​in fact, he was too fine a fellow. It was the vein of quixotic chivalry in his nature that undid him. That was the cruelest part of the whole thing. And I am bound to say that the doubts the higher criticism had put into my mind were very much assisted by the fact that it was this poor chap’s real nobility of soul which destroyed him.

"From the point of view of reason, any man was wrong to marry such a woman, even allowing for the fact that he was ignorant of her real character and vocation when he married her. From the point of view of ethics he was wrong; that is to say, he had not even infringed the code of conventional morality, and was therefore under no obligation to do so. And where he was doubly wrong in the sight of reason and ethics, and where, in the sight of the Saviour of mankind, he was so magnificently right, was in sticking to her in the way he did.

"And yet that man came to the gallows. For years afterwards I could never think of him without a feeling of inward rage that almost amounted to blasphemy. But to return to Reason v. Experience, I am merely telling this story for the sake of what I am going to say now. I went to see that poor man in prison after his trial, when he had only one day to live, and I shall never forget the look of him. He was like a saint. He looked into my eyes and took my hand and he said, and I can hear his words now, 'Mr. Thorneycroft, you can take it from me, there is a God.'

"I have never forgotten those words. And many times since they were spoken I firmly believe it has only been the words of my poor friend, Henry Harper, spoken on the brink of a shameful grave, which have saved me." The name fell unconsciously from the lips of James Thorneycroft.

XXIV

The Sailor never went again to the meetings of the Social Debating Society at Crosbie’s in the Strand, Somehow he had not the courage. The simple unadorned story of James Thorneycroft had taken complete possession of his mind.

Without making any researches into the subject, some instinct which transcended reason, which transcended experience itself, told him that the Henry Harper of the story was his own father. Moreover, he was prepared to affirm that it was his own presence in that room—​unknown as he was to James Thorneycroft to whom he had never spoken a word in his life—​which had been responsible for the story’s telling.

This clear conviction brought no shame to Henry Harper. No man could have been more amply vindicated in the sight of others than his father had been by him who had given his story with a poignancy which had silenced all criticism of the deductions he had ventured to draw from it.

The feeling uppermost in the mind of Henry Harper was that one world more had been revealed. At various times in his life he had had intimations of the Unseen. There was something beyond himself with which he had been in familiar contact. But up till now he had never thought about it much.

The story he had heard seemed to alter everything. In a subtle way his whole outlook was changed. The fact that his father had died such a death brought with it no sense of ignominy. It was too remote, too far beyond him; besides, the man who had told the story had been careful to show his father’s true character.

It was almost inconceivable that he did not apply the logic of this terrible event to his own case. By now it should have been clear that he was literally treading the same path. Perhaps the voice of reason could not argue with the overwhelming forces which now had Henry Harper in their grip. Once they had driven him into an identical position they forced him to act in a similar way. Just as the father had made the disastrous error of setting himself to reform his wife when he had found out what she was, the son was now preparing to repeat it.

He determined upon a great effort to win Cora from drink.

Since the quarrel over the man in the taxi, which had occurred nearly two months ago, they had drifted further apart. Cora had behaved with great unwisdom and she was aware of the fact. But she was not going to risk the loss of the golden eggs if she could possibly help it. She had been shaken more than a little by her own folly, and if Harry had not been a dead-beat fool it must have meant a pretty decisive nail in her coffin. Even as it was, and in spite of the softness for which she despised him, his tone had hardened perceptibly since the incident. Not that she cared very much for that. She did not believe he had it in him to go to extremities. And yet now he had taken this new tone she was not quite sure. Perhaps he was not quite so "soppy" as her friends always declared him to be.

Be that as it may, Cora accepted it in good part when Harry took upon himself to beg her earnestly to check her habit of drinking more than she ought. She was even a little touched; she had not expected a solicitude which she knew she didn’t deserve. Instead of "telling him off," as she felt she ought to have done, she promised to do her best to meet his wishes.

He was so grateful that he tried to find a way of helping her. He must let her see that he was ready to assist any effort she might make by every means in his power. Therefore, several evenings a week he accompanied her to the Roc and sometimes they went on, as formerly, to a play or a music hall.

When, after an absence of many months, Henry Harper reappeared in these haunts of fashion, he had to run the gantlet of the girls and the boys. But Cora was secretly gratified to find that he was much better able to take care of himself now. Those months of sequestration, unknown to her, had been a period of very remarkable development. He had been mixing on terms of equality with a class much above hers, he had been enlarging the scope of his observation, he had been deepening his experience. Moreover, he had discovered the letter aitch, and with the help of the indefatigable Madame Sadleir, who was a skillful and conscientious teacher, was now making use of the new knowledge.

Yes, there was a great improvement in Harry. In the opinion of his critics he was much more a man of the world; callow youths and insipid ladies of the town could no longer "come it over him" in the way that had formerly delighted them. Even Miss Bonser and Miss Press had to use discretion. The new knowledge did not make him a prig, but it seemed to give his character an independence and a depth which called for respectful treatment.

He disliked these evenings as much as ever. The Roc and Cora’s friends could never have any sort of attraction for Henry Harper. But there was now the sense of duty to sustain him. He was making a heroic effort to save Cora from herself, yet he sometimes felt in his heart that such a woman was hardly worth the saving.

The fact was, it was no use disguising it now, she jarred every nerve in his soul. The more he developed the more hopeless she grew. He knew now that she was very common, sordid clay. It was not in her to rise or to respond. She was crass, heavy-witted, coarse-fibered; his effort had to be made against fearful, and as it seemed with the new perceptions that were coming upon him, ever increasing odds.

By this he had learned from the new and finer world into which his talent had brought him that Cora had but a thin veneer of spurious refinement after all. He knew enough now to see how hopelessly wrong she was in everything, from the heart outwards. It began to hurt him more and more to be in her company in public places. Sometimes he could hardly bear to sit at the same table with her, so alien she was from the people he was meeting now on terms approximating to equality.

Edward Ambrose, realizing how the young man was striving to rise with his fortunes, was doing all that lay in his power to help him. At this time, the name of Mrs. Henry Harper had not been mentioned to him. Several times the Sailor had been at the point of revealing that sinister figure in the background of his life. More than once he had felt that it was the due of this judicious friend that he should know at least of the existence of Cora. But each time he had tried to screw his courage to the task a kind of nausea had overwhelmed him. The truth was Edward Ambrose and Cora stood at opposite poles, and whenever he tried to speak of her it became impossible to do so.

Henry Harper had been present at several of the very agreeable bachelor dinner parties in Bury Street, and on each occasion his host had noted an honorable and increasing effort on the part of the neophyte to rise to the measure of his opportunity. There could be no doubt he was coming on amazingly. The rough edges were being smoothed down and he was always so simple and unaffected that it was hardly possible for liberal-minded men whom fortune had given a place in the stalls at the human comedy to refrain from liking him.

"Henry," said his friend when the young man looked in one afternoon in Pall Mall, "what are you doing tomorrow week, Friday, the twenty-third?"

Henry was doing nothing in particular.

"Then you must come and dine with me," said Edward Ambrose.

"I’ll be delighted."

"Wait a minute. That’s not the important part. You’ll have to take somebody in to dinner. And she’s about the nicest girl I know, and she wants very much to meet the author of 'Dick Smith,' and I promised that she should. There will be two or three others …​ Ellis and his fiancee …​ I told you Ellis had just got engaged …​ but we shall not be more than ten all told. Will you face it, Henry, just to oblige a friend?"

A dinner party of ten with ladies was rather a facer for Mr. Henry Harper, in spite of the fact that his social laurels were clustering thicker upon him.

"I suppose I’ll have to if you’ve promised her," he said with not ungracious reluctance.

"I’m sure you’ll like her as much as she’ll like you," said Edward Ambrose.

That remains to be seen was the mental reservation in the mind of the Sailor.

XXV

Friday week soon came, but very unfortunately it found Cora "in one of her moods."

The first intimation she had of the dinner party was the arrival of a parcel of evening clothes, which Harry had purchased that morning in the Strand. As ladies were to be present, his sense of the fitness of things had led him at last to incur this long-promised expense. Indeed, Cora herself had said that sooner or later this would have to be. But now that the clothes had actually arrived and she insisted upon being told for what purpose they were required, she flew into a tantrum.

In Cora’s opinion, there had been too much dining already with this Mr. Ambrose, and now that Harry was being invited to meet ladies, had Mr. Ambrose been a true gentleman she would have been invited as well. It did not occur to her that he was not aware of her existence. But in any case Harry ought not to be going to meet other women without his wife.

Cora became very sulky. And she mingled unamiability with abuse. The sad truth was, and her husband realized it with intense bitterness in the course of that afternoon, she had begun drinking heavily again in spite of all that he could do to check her. It was a failure of the will. There was no doubt life bored her. The restraints she had recently put upon herself, not in regard to drink alone, had become more than she could bear. For a week past she had known that another "break-out" was imminent.

She was now inclined to make this dinner party to which she was not invited a pretext for it.

"I see what it is," she said with ugly eyes. "Your lawful wife is not good enough for my lord Ambrose and his lady friends."

This stung, it was so exactly the truth.

"But don’t think for a moment I am going to take it lying down. If you go to this party I’m coming too."

"You can’t," said her husband quietly—​so quietly that it made her furious.

"Oh, can’t I!"

"No, you can’t," he said with a finality that offered no salve. He was angry with his own weakness. He knew that it had caused him to drift into a false position. And yet what could he do—​with such a wife as that?

"You’re ashamed of me," she said, with baffled rage in her voice.

"You’ve no right to say that." It was a feeble rejoinder, but silence would have been worse.

"I am going to give you fair warning, Harry. If you go to this party and meet other women while I am left at home, I shall…​."

"You’ll what?" he said, recoiling from her heavy breathing ugliness.

"I shall go a good old blind tonight, I warn you."

She spoke with full knowledge of the effort he had made to help her and all that it had cost him.

"It won’t be half a blind, I’m telling you," she said, reading his eyes. "I’ve done my best for weeks and weeks to please you. I’ve hardly touched a drop—​and this is all the thanks I get. I’m flesh and blood like other people."

She saw with malicious triumph that she had him cornered.

"Look here, Cora," he said, "it’s too late to get out of this now. It wouldn’t be fair or right for me to break my word to Mr. Ambrose. But I’ll promise this. If you will only keep sober tonight, I’ll never go to another party without …​ without your permission."

"Without my permission!"

"Without you, then, if that’s what you want me to say."

"Oh, yes! I don’t think!"

"I don’t ever break my word," he said simply. "You know that. If I say a thing I try my best to act up to it."

"Well, it’s not good enough for me, anyhow," she said, with a sudden and jealous knowledge of her own inferiority. "If you leave me tonight, so help me God, I’ll get absolutely blind."

She saw the horror in his eyes and was glad. It gave her a sense of power. But it brought its own Nemesis. She forgot just then that he alone stood between her and the gutter.

"Be reasonable, Cora," he said weakly. There did not seem to be anything else he could say.

"I’ve warned you," she said savagely. "Leave me tonight and you’ll see. I’ll not be made a mark of by no one, not if I know it."

In great distress he retired to his bedroom in order to think things out. He felt that he was much in the wrong. Somehow he did not seem to be keeping to the terms of the bargain. Up to a point Cora had reason and justice on her side. Yet beyond that point was the duty to his friends.

In a miserable state of mind he sat on the bed. He was desperately unwilling to undo all the good work of the past six weeks, but it was certain that if he left Cora in her present mood something would happen. Twice he almost made up his mind not to go, but each time he was over-powered by the thought of his friend. It was really impossible to leave him in the lurch without a shadow of excuse.

At last, with a sense of acute misery, he came to a decision, or rather the swift passage of time forced it upon him. Suddenly he got off the bed, opened the parcel and spread out the new clothes.