n't go to sleep for
hours, Peter."

"And what would Aunt Mary say to me?" he inquired.

"Oh, she wouldn't care. She wouldn't even know it."

He shook his head, still smiling.

"I'd never be allowed to take you to Uhrig's Cave, or anywhere else,
again," he replied. "I'll come to-morrow evening, and you can talk to me
then."

"I shan't feel like it then," she said in a tone that implied his
opportunity was now or never. But seeing him still obdurate, with
startling suddenness she flung her arms mound his neck--a method which
at times had succeeded marvellously--and pleaded coaxingly: "Only a
quarter of an hour, Peter. I've got so many things to say, and I know I
shall forget them by to-morrow."

It was a night of wonders. To her astonishment the hitherto pliant
Peter, who only existed in order to do her will, became transformed
into a brusque masculine creature which she did not recognize. With a
movement that was almost rough he released himself and fled, calling
back a "good night" to her out of the darkness. He did not even wait
to assist her in the process of locking up. Honora, profoundly puzzled,
stood for a while in the doorway gazing out into the night. When at
length she turned, she had forgotten him entirely.

It was true that she did not sleep for hours, and on awaking the next
morning another phenomenon awaited her. The "little house under the
hill" was immeasurably shrunken. Poor Aunt Mary, who did not understand
that a performance of "Pinafore" could give birth to the unfulfilled
longings which result in the creation of high things, spoke to Uncle Tom
a week later concerning an astonishing and apparently abnormal access of
industry.

"She's been reading all day long, Tom, or else shut up in her room,
where Catherine tells me she is writing. I'm afraid Eleanor Hanbury is
right when she says I don't understand the child. And yet she is the
same to me as though she were my own."

It was true that Honora was writing, and that the door was shut, and
that she did not feel the heat. In one of the bookcases she had chanced
upon that immortal biography of Dr. Johnson, and upon the letters of
another prodigy of her own sex, Madame d'Arblay, whose romantic debut
as an authoress was inspiration in itself. Honora actually quivered when
she read of Dr. Johnson's first conversation with Miss Burney. To write
a book of the existence of which even one's own family did not know, to
publish it under a nom de plume,