send you enlighten me fully on Wednesday, or number three will
suffer!" Two days later he resumed, as he was beginning his journey back
to Lausanne. "I am in a great state of excitement on account of your
intelligence, and desperately anxious to know all about it. I shall be
put out to an unspeakable extent if I don't find your letter awaiting
me. God knows there has been small comfort for either of us in the _D.
N._'s nine months." There was not much to tell then, and there is less
now; but at last the discomfort was over for us both, as I had been
unable to reconcile myself to a longer continuance of the service I had
given in Whitefriars since he quitted it. The subject may be left with
the remark made upon it in his first letter after returning to Rosemont.
"I certainly am very glad of the result of the _Daily News_ business,
though my gladness is dashed with melancholy to think that you should
have toiled there so long, to so little purpose. I escaped more easily.
However, it is all past now. . . . As to the undoubted necessity of the
course you took, I have not a grain of question in my mind. That, being
what you are, you had only one course to take and have taken it, I no
more doubt than that the Old Bailey is not Westminster Abbey. In the
utmost sum at which you value yourself, you were bound to leave; and
now you _have_ left, you will come to Paris, and there, and at home
again, we'll have, please God, the old kind of evenings and the old life
again, as it used to be before those daily nooses caught us by the legs
and sometimes tripped us up. Make a vow (as I have done) never to go
down that court with the little news-shop at the corner, any more, and
let us swear by Jack Straw as in the ancient times. . . . I am beginning to
get over my sorrow for your nights up aloft in Whitefriars, and to feel
nothing but happiness in the contemplation of your enfranchisement. God
bless you!"

The time was now shortening for him at Lausanne; but before my sketches
of his pleasant days there close, the little story of his Christmas book
may be made complete by a few extracts from the letters that followed
immediately upon the departure of the Talfourds. Without comment they
will explain its closing touches, his own consciousness of the
difficulties in working out the tale within limits too confined not to
render its proper development imperfect, and his ready tact in dealing
with objection and suggestion from without. His con