y as of
no account. He could think only of his need and its foiled chance: his
need was more urgent than any love. He had come for help, and found her
colloguing with his enemy.

In his abject rage he could easily have done her violence and as easily
have run forward and cried her pity. Between the two impulses he crouched
irresolute and let her pass.

Hester came down the steps slowly, passed within a yard of him, and as
slowly went up the dark courtyard. For the last time she paused, with her
hand on Mr. Benny's door-latch; and this was what she said there to
herself, silently--

"But why Harriet?--of all the hateful names!"

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE RESCUE.

"Style," said Mr. Joshua Benny, "has been defined as a gift of saying
anything, of striking any note in the scale of human feelings, without
impropriety. We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker--what I may call
the _je ne sais quoi_"--

Mr. Joshua put this with a fine modesty, the distinction of his own style
being proverbial--in Spendilove's Press Supply Bureau at any rate. He
might have added with a wave of the hand, "You see to what it has advanced
me!" for whereas the rest of Spendilove's literary men toiled in two
gangs, one on either side of a long high-pitched desk, and wrote slashing
leaders for the provincial press, Mr. Joshua exercised his lightness of
touch upon 'picturesque middles' in a sort of loose-box partitioned off
from the main office by screens of opaque glass. This den--he spoke of it
as his 'scriptorium'--had a window looking out upon an elevated railway,
along which the trains of the London, Chatham, and Dover line banged and
rattled all day long. For Spendilove's (as it was called by its
familiars) inhabited the second floor of a building close to the foot of
Ludgate Hill. The noise no longer disturbed Mr. Joshua, except when an
engine halted just outside to blow off steam.

Mr. Joshua leaned back in his writing-chair, tapped a galley proof with
admonitory forefinger, and gazed over his spectacles upon Mr. Parker--a
weedy youth with a complexion suggestive of uncooked pastry.

"We cannot all have distinction, Mr. Parker, nor can it be acquired by
effort. Vigour we may cultivate, and clearness we must; it is essential.
On a level with these I should place propriety. Propriety teaches us to
regulate our speech by the occasion; to be incisive at times and at times
urbane; to adapt the 'how' to the 'when,' as I might p