e_, in
which he deplored himself in the character of an intelligent
land-owner, but in which she detected also a growing
interest and satisfaction in all that he was finding to
do. Janet saw it always with a throb of pleasure; his
art was much to her, but the sympathy that bound him to
the practical side of his world was more, though she
would not have confessed it. She was unconsciously
comforted by the sense that it was on the warm, bright,
comprehensible side of his interest in life that she
touched him--and that Elfrida did not touch him. The idea
of the country house in Devonshire excluded Elfrida, and
it was an exclusion Janet could be happy in conscientiously,
since Elfrida did not care.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Even in view of her popular magazine articles and her
literary name Janet's novel was a surprising success.
There is no reason why we should follow the example of
all the London critics except Elfrida Bell, and go into
the detail of its slender story, and its fairly original,
broadly human qualities of treatment, to explain this;
the fact will, perhaps, be accepted without demonstration.
It was a common phrase among the reviewers--though Messrs.
Lash and Black carefully cut it out of their selections
for advertisement--that the book with all its merits was
in no way remarkable; and the publishers were as much
astonished as anybody else when the first edition was
exhausted in three weeks. Yet the agreeable fact remained
that the reviewers gave it the amount of space usually
assigned to books allowed to be remarkable, and that the
_Athenian_ announced the second edition to be had "at
all book-sellers'" on a certain Monday. "When they say
it is not remarkable," wrote Kendal to Janet, "they mean
that it is not heroic, and that it is published in one
volume, at six shillings. To be remarkable--to the
trade--it should have dealt with epic passion, in three
volumes, at thirty."

To him the book had a charm quite apart from its literary
value, in the revelation it made of its author. It was
the first piece of work Janet had done from a seriously
artistic point of view, into which she had thrown herself
without fence or guard, and it was to him as if she had
stepped from behind a mask. He wrote to her about it
with the confidence of the new relation it established
between them; he looked forward with warm pleasure to
the closer intimacy which it would bring. To Janet, living
in this new sweetness of thei